regiment passing through the street, she would stand in the doorway
with a jug of cider and give the soldiers a drink. She nursed cholera
victims. She protected Polish refugees, and one of them even declared
that he wished to marry her. But they quarrelled, for one morning when
she returned from the Angelus she found him in the kitchen coolly eating
a dish which he had prepared for himself during her absence.

After the Polish refugees, came Colmiche, an old man who was credited
with having committed frightful misdeeds in '93. He lived near the river
in the ruins of a pig-sty. The urchins peeped at him through the cracks
in the walls and threw stones that fell on his miserable bed, where he
lay gasping with catarrh, with long hair, inflamed eyelids, and a tumour
as big as his head on one arm.

She got him some linen, tried to clean his hovel and dreamed of
installing him in the bake-house without his being in Madame's way. When
the cancer broke, she dressed it every day; sometimes she brought him
some cake and placed him in the sun on a bundle of hay; and the poor old
creature, trembling and drooling, would thank her in his broken voice,
and put out his hands whenever she left him. Finally he died; and she
had a mass said for the repose of his soul.

That day a great joy came to her: at dinner-time, Madame de
Larsonniere's servant called with the parrot, the cage, and the perch
and chain and lock. A note from the baroness told Madame Aubain that as
her husband had been promoted to a prefecture, they were leaving that
night, and she begged her to accept the bird as a remembrance and a
token of her esteem.

Since a long time the parrot had been on Felicite's mind, because he