Paquette la Chantefleurie’s daughter disappears and an infant is exchanged in a story Mahiette recounts as the origin of a mother’s grief, a foundling’s arrival in Paris, and Gudule’s enduring suspicion of the Egyptian people. The account separates what witnesses say they saw from the frightening conclusions the community draws: Agnes vanishes, a different infant appears in her place, and rumor supplies an explanation that the evidence cannot establish. Its consequences persist long after the exchange, joining a private loss to a public accusation.

Rumor and the visit to the Egyptian band

Mahiette places the beginning of the tragedy amid the arrival of an itinerant Egyptian and Bohemian band in Reims. The group’s unfamiliar appearance and customs have already made them objects of curiosity and suspicion. People circulate stories of stolen children and other alleged crimes; those who warn others away from the visitors nevertheless go to see them secretly. The tale presents these claims as rumors, not verified facts, but makes clear how readily fear accompanies fascination.

Paquette, curious about what might become of her daughter, brings Agnes to the visitors. The child is not yet a year old. The women of the band admire and caress her, paying particular attention to her feet and shoes. They make encouraging predictions about Agnes’s future, including that she will be beautiful, virtuous, and a queen. Paquette returns home pleased by these assurances. In Mahiette’s telling, the mother’s trust and excitement make the sudden loss that follows especially stark: she has just been imagining a grand future for the child when she leaves her briefly alone.

Agnes disappears

The next day, Agnes is asleep in bed when Paquette steps out to tell a neighbor about the predictions. Mother and child usually sleep together; this is a short absence, not a separation Paquette intends to prolong. On returning, she finds the door open wider than she left it and the bed empty. One of Agnes’s little shoes is all that remains. The shoe becomes the sole object linking the mother to the vanished child.

Paquette searches the streets of Reims for the rest of the day, stopping passersby and appealing to the priest of Saint-Remy. Mahiette recounts her distress through the scale of her pleas: Paquette offers herself to anyone who can restore her daughter. The search yields no answer. The house has been isolated, the street is deserted, and no one can tell her where Agnes has gone.

A neighbor later reports seeing two members of the band enter Paquette’s home carrying a bundle and leave after closing the door. Afterward, the neighbor hears what sounds like a child crying in Paquette’s room. When Paquette returns, she finds a different infant there: a disabled, one-eyed child. The reported visit and the substituted infant lead her to conclude that Agnes has been taken and another child left behind. The account establishes the exchange as the event’s central reversal, while the surrounding evidence does not establish what happened to Agnes.

Loss, interpretation, and disappearance

Paquette clings to Agnes’s remaining shoe, the only thing she has kept from her daughter. Her shock gives way to grief, and the object becomes a keepsake around which her loss is concentrated. Mahiette’s account emphasizes that the disappearance cannot be repaired by the presence of the other infant: the child in the room is not Agnes, and Paquette’s attention remains fixed on the daughter who is gone.

The band has already left Reims. The following day, people find the remains of a large fire, ribbons belonging to Agnes, blood, and a ram’s dung on a heath between Gueux and Tilloy. The townspeople treat these traces as confirmation of their most alarming stories about the visitors. Mahiette reports the community’s conclusion as superstition and accusation, not as an independently proven account of Agnes’s fate. The gap between what was found and what people claim it proves is essential: uncertainty hardens into a tale of ritual wrongdoing, leaving Paquette with no reliable knowledge of her child’s whereabouts.

After hearing what the townspeople have concluded, Paquette does not answer them. Mahiette says her hair turns gray by the next day and that she disappears on the day after that. The account gives no further explanation of where she goes. Her disappearance follows the loss of Agnes and the collapse of the future she had imagined for her; it marks the end of Mahiette’s immediate account, not a resolution of the child’s fate.

The infant’s fate and the remembered scene

The infant is not burned or otherwise destroyed. Mahiette says the archbishop takes an interest in the child, performs an exorcism and blessing, and sends it to Paris to be exposed as a foundling on the wooden bed at Notre-Dame Cathedral. Gervaise objects that an infant she regards as demonic should have been placed among foundlings, but Mahiette does not know what later becomes of the child. The episode therefore connects the exchange to the foundling’s presence in Paris while preserving a limit in the witness’s knowledge.

The memory also explains the force of Gudule’s later outcry when she sees a woman at the pillory. Gudule calls her a child-stealer and curses her, interpreting the present scene through the old loss. The narration explicitly joins the two moments: the episode in the Rat-Hole and the public spectacle at the pillory have been unfolding in parallel, and Gudule’s words make their connection audible. Her accusation reveals the persistence of Paquette’s grief and suspicion; it does not, by itself, prove that the woman she sees took Agnes. Mahiette’s recollection thus supplies a history behind Gudule’s reaction while keeping the supposed explanation for the disappearance entangled with rumor.