She divided her time
between walking the streets with a basket and drinking the profits
away in the cabarets, and in the intervals she cursed and beat us.
We lived for the most part on the refuse she brought home at night--
on so much of her stock as had found no purchaser--and we played
about the gutters and alleys of the Market. So far as I remember we
were neither very happy nor yet very miserable. We knew that we were
brother and sister, and that Maman Trebuchet was not our real mother.
Beyond this we were not inquisitive, but took life as we found it.
"Nevertheless, I know now that we were not altogether lost, but that
eyes in Brussels were watching us; though how far they were friendly
I cannot tell you. I think sometimes that the agents of the Genoese,
who had hidden us there, must have been playing their own game as
well as their masters'. There was, for example, a dark man who often
visited the Market: he called himself a lay-brother, and seemed to
be busy with religious work among the poor of the quarter. We knew
him as Maitre Antoine at first, and so he was generally called: but
he told us that his real name was Antonio--or Antoniu, as he spoke
it--and that he came from Italy.
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