As soon as Sister Hyacinthe caught sight of him, she raised an
exclamation of surprise: "What! Monsieur Ferrand, is it you?" Indeed,
they both seemed amazed at meeting in this manner.
It is, however, the courageous mission of the Sisters of the Assumption
to tend the ailing poor, those who lie in agony in their humble garrets,
and cannot pay for nursing; and thus these good women spend their lives
among the wretched, installing themselves beside the sufferer's pallet in
his tiny lodging, and ministering to every want, attending alike to
cooking and cleaning, and living there as servants and relatives, until
either cure or death supervenes. And it was in this wise that Sister
Hyacinthe, young as she was, with her milky face, and her blue eyes which
ever laughed, had installed herself one day in the abode of this young
fellow, Ferrand, then a medical student, prostrated by typhoid fever, and
so desperately poor that he lived in a kind of loft reached by a ladder,
in the Rue du Four. And from that moment she had not stirred from his
side, but had remained with him until she cured him, with the passion of
one who lived only for others, one who when an infant had been found in a
church porch, and who had no other family than that of those who
suffered, to whom she devoted herself with all her ardently affectionate
nature. And what a delightful month, what exquisite comradeship, fraught
with the pure fraternity of suffering, had followed! When he called her
"Sister," it was really to a sister that he was speaking.
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