I have worked and worked! but God knows I am too old. I was an old woman when I nursed you. I can hardly see, I can hardly hear, I can hardly stand; and I am sick, I am diseased."
"I've no home, no bed, no food, no nothing!" she repeated. "The little children run after me in the street, they throw dirt at me; 'Hé! la folle! la folle!'" raising her voice in piercing imitation of their cruelty. "The little nigger children,—the rottenness of the earth! I fall in the gutters! The policemen drag me off. They club me; they beat me all over; they tear my clothes!—nigger policemen, little master!" Passion exhausted her breath at every item; her voice came hoarse and gusty out of her exposed, bony chest. "Clubbed by nigger policemen! Ah, God! They lock me up in the calaboose. Poor me!"
Her breath and recital ended in a wail of misery. The wail and the misery reached him, not here, but in that bright, gay, selfish world of Paris, where he had passed a happy youth, a useless manhood. "France? What was he, an American, a creole, doing in France when such things were passing in America?"
