CHAPTER VI.
FRANÇOIS AND AMANDINE.François and Amandine slept in a room immediately over the kitchen, and at the end of a passage which communicated with several other apartments that were used as “company rooms” for the guests who frequented the cabaret. After having eaten their frugal supper, instead of putting out their lantern, as the widow had ordered them, the two children watched, leaving their door ajar, for their brother Martial’s passing on his way to his own chamber.
Placed on a crippled stool, the lantern shed its dull beams through the transparent horn. Walls of plaster, with here and there brown deal boards, a flock-bed for François, a little old child’s bed, much too short, for Amandine, a pile of broken chairs and dismembered benches, mementoes of the turbulent visitors t
