By the help of a pass-key, he let himself into Pere Rouget's house, and went to bed without making any noise, saying to himself,-- "To-morrow, my thoughts will be clear." It is now necessary to relate where the sultana of the place Saint-Jean picked up the nickname of "Rabouilleuse," and how she came to be the quasi-mistress of Jean-Jacques Rouget's home.
As old Doctor Rouget, the father of Jean-Jacques and Madame Bridau, advanced in years, he began to perceive the nonentity of his son; he then treated him harshly, trying to break him into a routine that might serve in place of intelligence.

He thus, though unconsciously, prepared him to submit to the yoke of the first tyranny that threw its halter over his head.
Coming home one day from his professional round, the malignant and vicious old man came across a bewitching little girl at the edge of some fields that lay along the avenue de Tivoli.

Hearing the horse, the child sprang up from the bottom of one of the many brooks which are to be seen from the heights of Issoudun, threading the meadows like ribbons of silver on a green robe.

Naiad-like, she rose suddenly on the doctor's vision, showing the loveliest virgin head that painters ever dreamed of.
Old Rouget, who knew the whole country-side, did not know this miracle of beauty.

The child, who was half naked, wore a forlorn little petticoat of coarse woollen stuff, woven in alternate strips of brown and white, full of holes and very ragged.