834 Les Miserables
was in the forest; and he ate the little cocks.’
And this other poem:—
‘There came a blow with a stick.
‘It was Punchinello who bestowed it on the cat.
‘It was not good for her; it hurt her.
‘Then a lady put Punchinello in prison.’
It was there that a little abandoned child, a foundling
whom the convent was bringing up out of charity, uttered
this sweet and heart-breaking saying. She heard the oth-
ers talking of their mothers, and she murmured in her
corner:—
‘As for me, my mother was not there when I was born!’
There was a stout portress who could always be seen hur-
rying through the corridors with her bunch of keys, and
whose name was Sister Agatha. The big big girls—those
over ten years of age— called her Agathocles.
The refectory, a large apartment of an oblong square
form, which received no light except through a vaulted
cloister on a level with the garden, was dark and damp, and,
as the children say, full of beasts. All the places round about
furnished their contingent of insects.
Each of its four corners had received, in the language of
the pupils, a special and expressive name. There was Spider
corner, Caterpillar corner, Wood-louse corner, and Cricket
corner.
Cricket corner was near the kitchen and was highly es-
teemed. It was not so cold there as elsewhere. From the
refectory the names had passed to the boarding-school, and
there served as in the old College Mazarin to distinguish