She was hardly out of prison when Ernest's father chanced upon a woman who could provide for him more liberally, and Clémentine was again a free agent. The streets knew her no more, though for an interval the workhouse did. This was the crisis when, with the shrewdness acquired in the London slums, she learned something of the English law to her own advantage, and through the courts compelled the father to contribute to the support of his son. The weekly three shillings and sixpence paid for a room. For food she had to work. With prison behind her, she was afraid to ask for a place in respectable houses, and I should not care to record the sinks of iniquity and squalid dens where her shrill treble and little girl's giggle were heard. Ernest was dumped down of a morning upon any friendly neighbour who would keep an eye on him, until, somehow or other, _la vieille grandmère_ appeared upon the scene and Clémentine once more had two to feed and the daily problem of her own hunger to face.
Her responsibilities never drove her to work harder than was absolutely necessary. "We must all toil or steal," Carlyle says. But Clémentine knew better. She could have suggested a third alternative, for she had reduced begging to a fine art. Her scent was as keen for charitable associations as a pig's for truffles, and she could tell to a minute the appointed time of their alms-giving, and to a penny the value of their alms. She would, no matter when, drop regular work at the risk of losing it, to rush off after a possible charity. There was a _Société_--I never knew it by any other name--that, while she was with me, drew her from my kitchen floor or my luncheon dishes as surely as Thursday came round, and the clock struck one. Why it existed she never made quite clear to me,--I doubt if she had an idea why, herself. It was enough for her that the poor French in London were under its special charge, and that, when luck was with her, she might come away with a loaf of bread, or an order for coals, or, if she played the beggar well, as much as a shilling.
She kept up a brisk correspondence with "_Madame la Baronne de Rothschild_," whose sole mission in life she apparently believed was to see her out of her difficulties. _La Baronne_, on one occasion, gave her a sovereign, Heaven knows why, unless as a desperate measure to close the correspondence; but a good part of it went in postage for letters representing why the bestowal of sovereigns upon Clémentine should become habitual. Stray agents, presumably from _la Baronne_, would pay me mysterious visits, to ask if Clémentine were a deserving object of benevolence, and I was exposed to repeated cross-examination in her regard. She made a point of learning the hours when the _chefs_ left the kitchens of the big hotels and restaurants near the _Quartier_, and also of finding out who among them might be looked to for a few odd pence for the sake of Ernest's father, at one time a washer of dishes, or who, after a _coup de vin_ or an _absinthe_, grew generous with their money. She had gauged the depth of every tender heart in the _Quartier_ and the possibility of scraps and broken meats at every shop and eating-place. And no one understood better how to beg, how to turn on the limelight and bring out in melodramatic relief the enormity of her need and destitution. The lisping treble, the giggle, the tattered clothes, _la vieille grandmère_, the desertion of the little Ernest's father, the little Ernest himself, were so many valuable assets. Indeed, she appreciated the value of the little Ernest so well that once she would have had me multiply him by twelve when she asked me to vouch for her poverty before some new society disposed to be friendly. If luck went against her, and nothing came of her begging, she was not discouraged. Begging was a game of chance with her,--her Monte Carlo or Little Horses,--and she never murmured over her failures, but with her faculty for making the best of all things, she got amusement out of them as well as out of her successes.