Agnes is stolen and an infant is exchanged

Agnes is stolen and an infant is exchanged in a story Mahiette recounts about Paquette la Chantefleurie’s loss of her daughter. A brief visit to fortune-tellers is followed by Agnes’s disappearance and the discovery of a different, unfamiliar child in her place. The surviving shoe becomes the material remnant of the lost child, while rumor turns an unexplained disappearance into a tale of supernatural crime. The account also explains the grief behind Paquette’s later reclusion and prepares for her furious recognition of the dancer at the pillory.

The visit to the travelers

Mahiette presents the episode as part of the history of Paquette, a young mother in Reims whose curiosity led her to bring Agnes to a camp outside the town. The visitors were identified as Egyptians and described as a wandering band led by a duke and counts. The town had refused them entry, but they camped beyond the gate of Braine, near the old chalk pits, where townspeople nevertheless came to see them and hear their predictions.

The visitors’ reputation was already divided between fascination and suspicion. They foretold impressive futures for those whose hands they read, and Paquette hoped to learn what awaited her child. The prediction that Agnes would become beautiful, virtuous, and a queen filled her mother with pride. Mahiette emphasizes that the child was not yet a year old, and recounts her small gestures and her mother’s delight in her. The Egyptian women admired Agnes and paid particular attention to her feet and shoes. Paquette left the encounter pleased by the forecast, not fearing that the visit would be followed by catastrophe.

The disappearance and the exchanged child

The next day, while Agnes slept beside her mother, Paquette stepped out briefly to tell a neighbor about the future promised to her daughter. When she returned, the door stood more open than she had left it and Agnes was gone. The one object remaining was one of the child’s little shoes. Paquette searched the streets and questioned passers-by, but the account gives her no lead to the child’s whereabouts.

A neighbor later reported seeing two people from the traveling group enter Paquette’s room carrying a bundle and leave after closing the door. After they were gone, a child’s cries were heard inside. Paquette hurried back, expecting to find Agnes, but instead discovered an unfamiliar infant: a boy, several years old by appearance, with a disability and a face and manner unlike the child she had lost. Mahiette’s narrative thus establishes the exchange through the sequence of reported entry, departure, cries, and discovery, while giving no explanation of how or why the substitution occurred.

For Paquette, the shoe became the sole remaining link to Agnes. She held it and kissed it, overwhelmed by the loss; the child found in the room could not replace the daughter she remembered. Mahiette relates the episode through Paquette’s grief rather than through any account from the visitors or the child. The exchange is therefore presented as a fact of the remembered story, but the circumstances surrounding it remain beyond the mother’s knowledge.

Rumor, grief, and consequence

The account distinguishes the reported events from the conclusions the townspeople draw. After the travelers had left, people found remnants of a fire, ribbons associated with Paquette’s child, bloodstains, and signs they attributed to a ram at a heath between Gueux and Tilloy. These discoveries did not establish what had happened to Agnes. Nevertheless, the community interpreted them through existing accusations that the Egyptians stole children and practiced monstrous rites. Mahiette repeats that fearful explanation as the belief that spread after the search, not as an independently witnessed account of Agnes’s fate.

The rumors had already shaped how the travelers were regarded: they were barred from entering Reims, yet drew curious crowds, and their visitors’ predictions coexisted with warnings about theft and other supposed crimes. Paquette’s loss gave those suspicions a personal focus. Her disappearance into grief follows the news and the community’s interpretation of the evidence; Mahiette says that Paquette’s hair turned gray and that she herself vanished the following day. The story explains the beginning of her separation from ordinary life without claiming that the rumors proved what became of Agnes.

The later echo at the pillory

Mahiette’s account gains another significance when the recluse sees a scene at the pillory. Recognizing the dancer there as the person she associates with the Egyptian visitors, Paquette cries out that the woman has called to her again and accuses her of stealing children. The parallel between the old loss and the public scene makes the shoe and the absent daughter recur in the narrative as the source of Paquette’s lasting fury.

That later outburst reveals the force, not the truth, of Paquette’s belief: she understands the dancer through the disappearance that transformed her life. The narrative places the recluse’s cry across two simultaneous scenes, joining the confined woman’s memory to the public spectacle at the pillory. The exchange story thereby connects private bereavement with public suspicion of the travelers, while leaving the child’s fate unresolved in the account presented here.