initial commit of ebook 1704HEADmain

1 files changed, 5913 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/prrtt10.txt b/old/prrtt10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f51744e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/prrtt10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5913 @@
+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of Pierrette, by Honore de Balzac*
+#60 in our series by Balzac
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+Pierrette
+
+by Honore de Balzac
+
+Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+April, 1999  [Etext #1704]
+
+
+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of Pierrette, by Honore de Balzac*
+******This file should be named prrtt10.txt or prrtt10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, prrtt11.txt.
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, prrtt10a.txt.
+
+
+Etext prepared by John Bickers, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz
+and Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-six text
+files per month, or 432 more Etexts in 1999 for a total of 2000+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 200 billion Etexts given away this year.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only ~5% of the present number of computer users.
+
+At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
+of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we
+manage to get some real funding; currently our funding is mostly
+from Michael Hart's salary at Carnegie-Mellon University, and an
+assortment of sporadic gifts; this salary is only good for a few
+more years, so we are looking for something to replace it, as we
+don't want Project Gutenberg to be so dependent on one person.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails. . .try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
+if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
+it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email.
+
+******
+
+To access Project Gutenberg etexts, use any Web browser
+to view http://promo.net/pg.  This site lists Etexts by
+author and by title, and includes information about how
+to get involved with Project Gutenberg.  You could also
+download our past Newsletters, or subscribe here.  This
+is one of our major sites, please email hart@pobox.com,
+for a more complete list of our various sites.
+
+To go directly to the etext collections, use FTP or any
+Web browser to visit a Project Gutenberg mirror (mirror
+sites are available on 7 continents; mirrors are listed
+at http://promo.net/pg).
+
+Mac users, do NOT point and click, typing works better.
+
+Example FTP session:
+
+ftp sunsite.unc.edu
+login: anonymous
+password: your@login
+cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
+cd etext90 through etext99
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET GUTINDEX.??  [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
+GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
+
+***
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+Etext prepared by John Bickers, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz
+and Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
+
+
+
+PIERRETTE
+
+by HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+
+Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+  To Mademoiselle Anna Hanska:
+
+  Dear Child,--You, the joy of the household, you, whose pink or
+  white pelerine flutters in summer among the groves of
+  Wierzschovnia like a will-o'-the-wisp, followed by the tender eyes
+  of your father and your mother,--how can I dedicate to /you/ a
+  story full of melancholy? And yet, ought not sorrows to be spoken
+  of to a young girl idolized as you are, since the day may come
+  when your sweet hands will be called to minister to them? It is so
+  difficult, Anna, to find in the history of our manners and morals
+  a subject that is worthy of your eyes, that no choice has been
+  left me; but perhaps you will be made to feel how fortunate your
+  fate is when you read the story sent to you by
+Your old friend,
+De Balzac.
+
+
+
+
+PIERRETTE
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE LORRAINS
+
+At the dawn of an October day in 1827 a young fellow about sixteen
+years of age, whose clothing proclaimed what modern phraseology so
+insolently calls a proletary, was standing in a small square of Lower
+Provins. At that early hour he could examine without being observed
+the various houses surrounding the open space, which was oblong in
+form. The mills along the river were already working; the whirr of
+their wheels, repeated by the echoes of the Upper Town in the keen air
+and sparkling clearness of the early morning, only intensified the
+general silence so that the wheels of a diligence could be heard a
+league away along the highroad. The two longest sides of the square,
+separated by an avenue of lindens, were built in the simple style
+which expresses so well the peaceful and matter-of-fact life of the
+bourgeoisie. No signs of commerce were to be seen; on the other hand,
+the luxurious porte-cocheres of the rich were few, and those few
+turned seldom on their hinges, excepting that of Monsieur Martener, a
+physician, whose profession obliged him to keep a cabriolet, and to
+use it. A few of the house-fronts were covered by grape vines, others
+by roses climbing to the second-story windows, through which they
+wafted the fragrance of their scattered bunches. One end of the square
+enters the main street of the Lower Town, the gardens of which reach
+to the bank of one of the two rivers which water the valley of
+Provins. The other end of the square enters a street which runs
+parallel to the main street.
+
+At the latter, which was also the quietest end of the square, the
+young workman recognized the house of which he was in search, which
+showed a front of white stone grooved in lines to represent courses,
+windows with closed gray blinds, and slender iron balconies decorated
+with rosettes painted yellow. Above the ground floor and the first
+floor were three dormer windows projecting from a slate roof; on the
+peak of the central one was a new weather-vane. This modern innovation
+represented a hunter in the attitude of shooting a hare. The front
+door was reached by three stone steps. On one side of this door a
+leaden pipe discharged the sink-water into a small street-gutter,
+showing the whereabouts of the kitchen. On the other side were two
+windows, carefully closed by gray shutters in which were heart-shaped
+openings cut to admit the light; these windows seemed to be those of
+the dining-room. In the elevation gained by the three steps were vent-
+holes to the cellar, closed by painted iron shutters fantastically cut
+in open-work. Everything was new. In this repaired and restored house,
+the fresh-colored look of which contrasted with the time-worn
+exteriors of all the other houses, an observer would instantly
+perceive the paltry taste and perfect self-satisfaction of the retired
+petty shopkeeper.
+
+The young man looked at these details with an expression of pleasure
+that seemed to have something rather sad in it; his eyes roved from
+the kitchen to the roof, with a motion that showed a deliberate
+purpose. The rosy glow of the rising sun fell on a calico curtain at
+one of the garret windows, the others being without that luxury. As he
+caught sight of it the young fellow's face brightened gaily. He
+stepped back a little way, leaned against a linden, and sang, in the
+drawling tone peculiar to the west of France, the following Breton
+ditty, published by Bruguiere, a composer to whom we are indebted for
+many charming melodies. In Brittany, the young villagers sing this
+song to all newly-married couples on their wedding-day:--
+
+  "We've come to wish you happiness in marriage,
+    To m'sieur your husband
+    As well as to you:
+
+  "You have just been bound, madam' la mariee,
+    With bonds of gold
+    That only death unbinds:
+
+  "You will go no more to balls or gay assemblies;
+    You must stay at home
+    While we shall go.
+
+  "Have you thought well how you are pledged to be
+    True to your spouse,
+    And love him like yourself?
+
+  "Receive these flowers our hands do now present you;
+    Alas! your fleeting honors
+    Will fade as they."
+
+This native air (as sweet as that adapted by Chateaubriand to /Ma
+soeur, te souvient-il encore/), sung in this little town of the Brie
+district, must have been to the ears of a Breton maiden the touchstone
+of imperious memories, so faithfully does it picture the manners and
+customs, the surroundings and the heartiness of her noble old land,
+where a sort of melancholy reigns, hardly to be defined; caused,
+perhaps, by the aspect of life in Brittany, which is deeply touching.
+This power of awakening a world of grave and sweet and tender memories
+by a familiar and sometimes lively ditty, is the privilege of those
+popular songs which are the superstitions of music,--if we may use the
+word "superstition" as signifying all that remains after the ruin of a
+people, all that survives their revolutions.
+
+As he finished the first couple, the singer, who never took his eyes
+from the attic curtain, saw no signs of life. While he sang the
+second, the curtain stirred. When the words "Receive these flowers"
+were sung, a youthful face appeared; a white hand cautiously opened
+the casement, and a girl made a sign with her head to the singer as he
+ended with the melancholy thought of the simple verses,--"Alas! your
+fleeting honors will fade as they."
+
+To her the young workman suddenly showed, drawing it from within his
+jacket, a yellow flower, very common in Brittany, and sometimes to be
+found in La Brie (where, however, it is rare),--the furze, or broom.
+
+"Is it really you, Brigaut?" said the girl, in a low voice.
+
+"Yes, Pierrette, yes. I am in Paris. I have started to make my way;
+but I'm ready to settle here, near you."
+
+Just then the fastening of a window creaked in a room on the first
+floor, directly below Pierrette's attic. The girl showed the utmost
+terror, and said to Brigaut, quickly:--
+
+"Run away!"
+
+The lad jumped like a frightened frog to a bend in the street caused
+by the projection of a mill just where the square opens into the main
+thoroughfare; but in spite of his agility his hob-nailed shoes echoed
+on the stones with a sound easily distinguished from the music of the
+mill, and no doubt heard by the person who opened the window.
+
+That person was a woman. No man would have torn himself from the
+comfort of a morning nap to listen to a minstrel in a jacket; none but
+a maid awakes to songs of love. Not only was this woman a maid, but
+she was an old maid. When she had opened her blinds with the furtive
+motion of the bat, she looked in all directions, but saw nothing, and
+only heard, faintly, the flying footfalls of the lad. Can there be
+anything more dreadful than the matutinal apparition of an ugly old
+maid at her window? Of all the grotesque sights which amuse the eyes
+of travellers in country towns, that is the most unpleasant. It is too
+repulsive to laugh at. This particular old maid, whose ear was so
+keen, was denuded of all the adventitious aids, of whatever kind,
+which she employed as embellishments; her false front and her
+collarette were lacking; she wore that horrible little bag of black
+silk on which old women insist on covering their skulls, and it was
+now revealed beneath the night-cap which had been pushed aside in
+sleep. This rumpled condition gave a menacing expression to the head,
+such as painters bestow on witches. The temples, ears, and nape of the
+neck, were disclosed in all their withered horror,--the wrinkles being
+marked in scarlet lines that contrasted with the would-be white of the
+bed-gown which was tied round her neck by a narrow tape. The gaping of
+this garment revealed a breast to be likened only to that of an old
+peasant woman who cares nothing about her personal ugliness. The
+fleshless arm was like a stick on which a bit of stuff was hung. Seen
+at her window, this spinster seemed tall from the length and
+angularity of her face, which recalled the exaggerated proportions of
+certain Swiss heads. The character of their countenance--the features
+being marked by a total want of harmony--was that of hardness in the
+lines, sharpness in the tones; while an unfeeling spirit, pervading
+all, would have filled a physiognomist with disgust. These
+characteristics, fully visible at this moment, were usually modified
+in public by a sort of commercial smile,--a bourgeois smirk which
+mimicked good-humor; so that persons meeting with this old maid might
+very well take her for a kindly woman. She owned the house on shares
+with her brother. The brother, by-the-bye, was sleeping so tranquilly
+in his own chamber that the orchestra of the Opera-house could not
+have awakened him, wonderful as its diapason is said to be.
+
+The old maid stretched her neck out of the window, twisted it, and
+raised her cold, pale-blue little eyes, with their short lashes set in
+lids that were always rather swollen, to the attic window, endeavoring
+to see Pierrette. Perceiving the uselessness of that attempt, she
+retreated into her room with a movement like that of a tortoise which
+draws in its head after protruding it from its carapace. The blinds
+were then closed, and the silence of the street was unbroken except by
+peasants coming in from the country, or very early persons moving
+about.
+
+When there is an old maid in a house, watch-dogs are unnecessary; not
+the slightest event can occur that she does not see and comment upon
+and pursue to its utmost consequences. The foregoing trifling
+circumstance was therefore destined to give rise to grave
+suppositions, and to open the way for one of those obscure dramas
+which take place in families, and are none the less terrible because
+they are secret,--if, indeed, we may apply the word "drama" to such
+domestic occurrences.
+
+Pierrette did not go back to bed. To her, Brigaut's arrival was an
+immense event. During the night--that Eden of the wretched--she
+escaped the vexations and fault-findings she bore during the day. Like
+the hero of a ballad, German or Russian, I forget which, her sleep
+seemed to her the happy life; her waking hours a bad dream. She had
+just had her only pleasurable waking in three years. The memories of
+her childhood had sung their melodious ditties in her soul. The first
+couplet was heard in a dream; the second made her spring out of bed;
+at the third, she doubted her ears,--the sorrowful are all disciples
+of Saint Thomas; but when the fourth was sung, standing in her night-
+gown with bare feet by the window, she recognized Brigaut, the
+companion of her childhood. Ah, yes! it was truly the well-known
+square jacket with the bobtails, the pockets of which stuck out at the
+hips,--the jacket of blue cloth which is classic in Brittany; there,
+too, were the waistcoat of printed cotton, the linen shirt fastened by
+a gold heart, the large rolling collar, the earrings, the stout shoes,
+the trousers of blue-gray drilling unevenly colored by the various
+lengths of the warp,--in short, all those humble, strong, and durable
+things which make the apparel of the Breton peasantry. The big buttons
+of white horn which fastened the jacket made the girl's heart beat.
+When she saw the bunch of broom her eyes filled with tears; then a
+dreadful fear drove back into her heart the happy memories that were
+budding there. She thought her cousin sleeping in the room beneath her
+might have heard the noise she made in jumping out of bed and running
+to the window. The fear was just; the old maid was coming, and she
+made Brigaut the terrified sign which the lad obeyed without the least
+understanding it. Such instinctive submission to a girl's bidding
+shows one of those innocent and absolute affections which appear from
+century to century on this earth, where they blossom, like the aloes
+of Isola Bella, twice or thrice in a hundred years. Whoever had seen
+the lad as he ran away would have loved the ingenuous chivalry of his
+most ingenuous feeling.
+
+Jacques Brigaut was worthy of Pierrette Lorrain, who was just fifteen.
+Two children! Pierrette could not keep from crying as she watched his
+flight in the terror her gesture had conveyed to him. Then she sat
+down in a shabby armchair placed before a little table above which
+hung a mirror. She rested her elbows on the table, put her head in her
+hands, and sat thinking for an hour, calling to memory the Marais, the
+village of Pen-Hoel, the perilous voyages on a pond in a boat untied
+for her from an old willow by little Jacques; then the old faces of
+her grandfather and grandmother, the sufferings of her mother, and the
+handsome face of Major Brigaut,--in short, the whole of her careless
+childhood. It was all a dream, a luminous joy on the gloomy background
+of the present.
+
+Her beautiful chestnut hair escaped in disorder from her cap, rumpled
+in sleep,--a cambric cap with ruffles, which she had made herself. On
+each side of her forehead were little ringlets escaping from gray
+curl-papers. From the back of her head hung a heavy braid of hair that
+was half unplaited. The excessive whiteness of her face betrayed that
+terrible malady of girlhood which goes by the name of chlorosis,
+deprives the body of its natural colors, destroys the appetite, and
+shows a disordered state of the organism. The waxy tones were in all
+the visible parts of her flesh. The neck and shoulders explained by
+their blanched paleness the wasted arms, flung forward and crossed
+upon the table. Her feet seemed enervated, shrunken from illness. Her
+night-gown came only to her knees and showed the flaccid muscles, the
+blue veins, the impoverished flesh of the legs. The cold, to which she
+paid no heed, turned her lips violet, and a sad smile, drawing up the
+corners of a sensitive mouth, showed teeth that were white as ivory
+and quite small,--pretty, transparent teeth, in keeping with the
+delicate ears, the rather sharp but dainty nose, and the general
+outline of her face, which, in spite of its roundness, was lovely. All
+the animation of this charming face was in the eyes, the iris of
+which, brown like Spanish tobacco and flecked with black, shone with
+golden reflections round pupils that were brilliant and intense.
+Pierrette was made to be gay, but she was sad. Her lost gaiety was
+still to be seen in the vivacious forms of the eye, in the ingenuous
+grace of her brow, in the smooth curve of her chin. The long eyelashes
+lay upon the cheek-bones, made prominent by suffering. The paleness of
+her face, which was unnaturally white, made the lines and all the
+details infinitely pure. The ear alone was a little masterpiece of
+modelling,--in marble, you might say. Pierrette suffered in many ways.
+Perhaps you would like to know her history, and this is it.
+
+Pierrette's mother was a Demoiselle Auffray of Provins, half-sister by
+the father's side of Madame Rogron, mother of the present owners of
+the house.
+
+Monsieur Auffray, her husband, had married at the age of eighteen; his
+second marriage took place when he was nearly sixty-nine. By the
+first, he had an only daughter, very plain, who was married at sixteen
+to an innkeeper of Provins named Rogron.
+
+By his second marriage the worthy Auffray had another daughter; but
+this one was charming. There was, of course, an enormous difference in
+the ages of these daughters; the one by the first marriage was fifty
+years old when the second child was born. By this time the eldest,
+Madame Rogron, had two grown-up children.
+
+The youngest daughter of the old man was married at eighteen to a man
+of her choice, a Breton officer named Lorrain, captain in the Imperial
+Guard. Love often makes a man ambitious. The captain, anxious to rise
+to a colonelcy, exchanged into a line regiment. While he, then a
+major, and his wife enjoyed themselves in Paris on the allowance made
+to them by Monsieur and Madame Auffray, or scoured Germany at the beck
+and call of the Emperor's battles and truces, old Auffray himself
+(formerly a grocer) died, at the age of eighty-eight, without having
+found time to make a will. His property was administered by his
+daughter, Madame Rogron, and her husband so completely in their own
+interests that nothing remained for the old man's widow beyond the
+house she lived in on the little square, and a few acres of land. This
+widow, the mother of Madame Lorrain, was only thirty-eight at the time
+of her husband's death. Like many widows, she came to the unwise
+decision of remarrying. She sold the house and land to her step-
+daughter, Madame Rogron, and married a young physician named Neraud,
+who wasted her whole fortune. She died of grief and misery two years
+later.
+
+Thus the share of her father's property which ought to have come to
+Madame Lorrain disappeared almost entirely, being reduced to the small
+sum of eight thousand francs. Major Lorrain was killed at the battle
+of Montereau, leaving his wife, then twenty-one years of age, with a
+little daughter of fourteen months, and no other means than the
+pension to which she was entitled and an eventual inheritance from her
+late husband's parents, Monsieur and Madame Lorrain, retail
+shopkeepers at Pen-Hoel, a village in the Vendee, situated in that
+part of it which is called the Marais. These Lorrains, grandfather and
+grandmother of Pierrette Lorrain, sold wood for building purposes,
+slates, tiles, pantiles, pipes, etc. Their business, either from their
+own incapacity or through ill-luck, did badly, and gave them scarcely
+enough to live on. The failure of the well-known firm of Collinet at
+Nantes, caused by the events of 1814 which led to a sudden fall in
+colonial products, deprived them of twenty-four thousand francs which
+they had just deposited with that house.
+
+The arrival of their daughter-in-law was therefore welcome to them.
+Her pension of eight hundred francs was a handsome income at Pen-Hoel.
+The eight thousand francs which the widow's half-brother and sister
+Rogron sent to her from her father's estate (after a multitude of
+legal formalities) were placed by her in the Lorrains' business, they
+giving her a mortgage on a little house which they owned at Nantes,
+let for three hundred francs, and barely worth ten thousand.
+
+Madame Lorrain the younger, Pierrette's mother, died in 1819. The
+child of old Auffray and his young wife was small, delicate, and
+weakly; the damp climate of the Marais did not agree with her. But her
+husband's family persuaded her, in order to keep her with them, that
+in no other quarter of the world could she find a more healthy region.
+She was so petted and tenderly cared for that her death, when it came,
+brought nothing but honor to the old Lorrains.
+
+Some persons declared that Brigaut, an old Vendeen, one of those men
+of iron who served under Charette, under Mercier, under the Marquis de
+Montauran, and the Baron du Guenic, in the wars against the Republic,
+counted for a good deal in the willingness of the younger Madame
+Lorrain to remain in the Marais. If it were so, his soul must have
+been a truly loving and devoted one. All Pen-Hoel saw him--he was
+called respectfully Major Brigaut, the grade he had held in the
+Catholic army--spending his days and his evenings in the Lorrains'
+parlor, beside the window of the imperial major. Toward the last, the
+curate of Pen-Hoel made certain representations to old Madame Lorrain,
+begging her to persuade her daughter-in-law to marry Brigaut, and
+promising to have the major appointed justice of peace for the canton
+of Pen-Hoel, through the influence of the Vicomte de Kergarouet. The
+death of the poor young woman put an end to the matter.
+
+Pierrette was left in charge of her grandparents who owed her four
+hundred francs a year, interest on the little property placed in their
+hands. This small sum was now applied to her maintenance. The old
+people, who were growing less and less fit for business, soon found
+themselves confronted by an active and capable competitor, against
+whom they said hard things, all the while doing nothing to defeat him.
+Major Brigaut, their friend and adviser, died six months after his
+friend, the younger Madame Lorrain,--perhaps of grief, perhaps of his
+wounds, of which he had received twenty-seven.
+
+Like a sound merchant, the competitor set about ruining his
+adversaries in order to get rid of all rivalry. With his connivance,
+the Lorrains borrowed money on notes, which they were unable to meet,
+and which drove them in their old days into bankruptcy. Pierrette's
+claim upon the house in Nantes was superseded by the legal rights of
+her grandmother, who enforced them to secure the daily bread of her
+poor husband. The house was sold for nine thousand five hundred
+francs, of which one thousand five hundred went for costs. The
+remaining eight thousand came to Madame Lorain, who lived upon the
+income of them in a sort of almshouse at Nantes, like that of Sainte-
+Perine in Paris, called Saint-Jacques, where the two old people had
+bed and board for a humble payment.
+
+As it was impossible to keep Pierrette, their ruined little
+granddaughter, with them, the old Lorrains bethought themselves of her
+uncle and aunt Rogron, in Provins, to whom they wrote. These Rogrons
+were dead. The letter might, therefore, have easily been lost; but if
+anything here below can take the place of Providence, it is the post.
+Postal spirit, incomparably above public spirit, exceeds in brilliancy
+of resource and invention the ablest romance-writers. When the post
+gets hold of a letter, worth, to it, from three to ten sous, and does
+not immediately know where to find the person to whom that letter is
+addressed, it displays a financial anxiety only to be met with in very
+pertinacious creditors. The post goes and comes and ferrets through
+all the eighty-six departments. Difficulties only arouse the genius of
+the clerks, who may really be called men-of-letters, and who set about
+to search for that unknown human being with as much ardor as the
+mathematicians of the Bureau give to longitudes. They literally
+ransack the whole kingdom. At the first ray of hope all the post-
+offices in Paris are alert. Sometimes the receiver of a missing letter
+is amazed at the network of scrawled directions which covers both back
+and front of the missive,--glorious vouchers for the administrative
+persistency with which the post has been at work. If a man undertook
+what the post accomplishes, he would lose ten thousand francs in
+travel, time, and money, to recover ten sous. The letter of the old
+Lorrains, addressed to Monsieur Rogron of Provins (who had then been
+dead a year) was conveyed by the post in due time to Monsieur Rogron,
+son of the deceased, a mercer in the rue Saint-Denis in Paris. And
+this is where the postal spirit obtains its greatest triumph. An heir
+is always more or less anxious to know if he has picked up every scrap
+of his inheritance, if he has not overlooked a credit, or a trunk of
+old clothes. The Treasury knows that. A letter addressed to the late
+Rogron at Provins was certain to pique the curiosity of Rogron, Jr.,
+or Mademoiselle Rogron, the heirs in Paris. Out of that human interest
+the Treasury was able to earn sixty centimes.
+
+These Rogrons, toward whom the old Lorrains, though dreading to part
+with their dear little granddaughter, stretched their supplicating
+hands, became, in this way, and most unexpectedly, the masters of
+Pierrette's destiny. It is therefore indispensable to explain both
+their antecedents and their character.
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE ROGRONS
+
+Pere Rogron, that innkeeper of Provins to whom old Auffray had married
+his daughter by his first wife, was an individual with an inflamed
+face, a veiny nose, and cheeks on which Bacchus had drawn his scarlet
+and bulbous vine-marks. Though short, fat, and pot-bellied, with stout
+legs and thick hands, he was gifted with the shrewdness of the Swiss
+innkeepers, whom he resembled. Certainly he was not handsome, and his
+wife looked like him. Never was a couple better matched. Rogron liked
+good living and to be waited upon by pretty girls. He belonged to the
+class of egoists whose behavior is brutal; he gave way to his vices
+and did their will openly in the face of Israel. Grasping, selfish,
+without decency, and always gratifying his own fancies, he devoured
+his earnings until the day when his teeth failed him. Selfishness
+stayed by him. In his old days he sold his inn, collected (as we have
+seen) all he could of his late father-in-law's property, and went to
+live in the little house in the square of Provins, bought for a trifle
+from the widow of old Auffray, Pierrette's grandmother.
+
+Rogron and his wife had about two thousand francs a year from twenty-
+seven lots of land in the neighborhood of Provins, and from the sale
+of their inn for twenty thousand. Old Auffray's house, though out of
+repair, was inhabited just as it was by the Rogrons,--old rats like
+wrack and ruin. Rogron himself took to horticulture and spent his
+savings in enlarging the garden; he carried it to the river's edge
+between two walls and built a sort of stone embankment across the end,
+where aquatic nature, left to herself, displayed the charms of her
+flora.
+
+In the early years of their marriage the Rogrons had a son and a
+daughter, both hideous; for such human beings degenerate. Put out to
+nurse at a low price, these luckless children came home in due time,
+after the worst of village training,--allowed to cry for hours after
+their wet-nurse, who worked in the fields, leaving them shut up to
+scream for her in one of those damp, dark, low rooms which serve as
+homes for the French peasantry. Treated thus, the features of the
+children coarsened; their voices grew harsh; they mortified their
+mother's vanity, and that made her strive to correct their bad habits
+by a sternness which the severity of their father converted through
+comparison to kindness. As a general thing, they were left to run
+loose about the stables and courtyards of the inn, or the streets of
+the town; sometimes they were whipped; sometimes they were sent, to
+get rid of them, to their grandfather Auffray, who did not like them.
+The injustice the Rogrons declared the old man did to their children,
+justified them to their own minds in taking the greater part of "the
+old scoundrel's" property. However, Rogron did send his son to school,
+and did buy him a man, one of his own cartmen, to save him from the
+conscription. As soon as his daughter, Sylvie, was thirteen, he sent
+her to Paris, to make her way as apprentice in a shop. Two years later
+he despatched his son, Jerome-Denis, to the same career. When his
+friends the carriers and those who frequented the inn, asked him what
+he meant to do with his children, Pere Rogron explained his system
+with a conciseness which, in view of that of most fathers, had the
+merit of frankness.
+
+"When they are old enough to understand me I shall give 'em a kick and
+say: 'Go and make your own way in the world!'" he replied, emptying
+his glass and wiping his lips with the back of his hand. Then he
+winked at his questioner with a knowing look. "Hey! hey! they are no
+greater fools than I was," he added. "My father gave me three kicks; I
+shall only give them one; he put one louis into my hand; I shall put
+ten in theirs, therefore they'll be better off than I was. That's the
+way to do. After I'm gone, what's left will be theirs. The notaries
+can find them and give it to them. What nonsense to bother one's self
+about children. Mine owe me their life. I've fed them, and I don't ask
+anything from them,--I call that quits, hey, neighbor? I began as a
+cartman, but that didn't prevent me marrying the daughter of that old
+scoundrel Auffray."
+
+Sylvie Rogron was sent (with six hundred francs for her board) as
+apprentice to certain shopkeepers originally from Provins and now
+settled in Paris in the rue Saint-Denis. Two years later she was "at
+par," as they say; she earned her own living; at any rate her parents
+paid nothing for her. That is what is called being "at par" in the rue
+Saint-Denis. Sylvie had a salary of four hundred francs. At nineteen
+years of age she was independent. At twenty, she was the second
+demoiselle in the Maison Julliard, wholesale silk dealers at the
+"Chinese Worm" rue Saint-Denis. The history of the sister was that of
+the brother. Young Jerome-Denis Rogron entered the establishment of
+one of the largest wholesale mercers in the same street, the Maison
+Guepin, at the "Three Distaffs." When Sylvie Rogron, aged twenty-one,
+had risen to be forewoman at a thousand francs a year Jerome-Denis,
+with even better luck, was head-clerk at eighteen, with a salary of
+twelve hundred francs.
+
+Brother and sister met on Sundays and fete-days, which they passed in
+economical amusements; they dined out of Paris, and went to Saint-
+Cloud, Meudon, Belleville, or Vincennes. Towards the close of the year
+1815 they clubbed their savings, amounting to about twenty thousand
+francs, earned by the sweat of their brows, and bought of Madame
+Guenee the property and good-will of her celebrated shop, the "Family
+Sister," one of the largest retail establishments in the quarter.
+Sylvie kept the books and did the writing. Jerome-Denis was master and
+head-clerk both. In 1821, after five years' experience, competition
+became so fierce that it was all the brother and sister could do to
+carry on the business and maintain its reputation.
+
+Though Sylvie was at this time scarcely forty, her natural ugliness,
+combined with hard work and a certain crabbed look (caused as much by
+the conformation of her features as by her cares), made her seem like
+a woman of fifty. At thirty-eight Jerome Rogron presented to the eyes
+of his customers the silliest face that ever looked over a counter.
+His retreating forehead, flattened by fatigue, was marked by three
+long wrinkles. His grizzled hair, cut close, expressed in some
+indefinable way the stupidity of a cold-blooded animal. The glance of
+his bluish eyes had neither flame nor thought in it. His round, flat
+face excited no sympathy, nor even a laugh on the lips of those who
+might be examining the varieties of the Parisian species; on the
+contrary, it saddened them. He was, like his father, short and fat,
+but his figure lacked the latter's brutal obesity, and showed,
+instead, an almost ridiculous debility. His father's high color was
+changed in him to the livid flabbiness peculiar to persons who live in
+close back-shops, or in those railed cages called counting-rooms,
+forever tying up bundles, receiving and making change, snarling at the
+clerks, and repeating the same old speeches to customers.
+
+The small amount of brains possessed by the brother and sister had
+been wholly absorbed in maintaining their business, in getting and
+keeping money, and in learning the special laws and usages of the
+Parisian market. Thread, needles, ribbons, pins, buttons, tailors'
+furnishings, in short, the enormous quantity of things which go to
+make up a mercer's stock, had taken all their capacity. Outside of
+their business they knew absolutely nothing; they were even ignorant
+of Paris. To them the great city was merely a region spreading around
+the Rue Saint-Denis. Their narrow natures could see no field except
+the shop. They were clever enough in nagging their clerks and their
+young women and in proving them to blame. Their happiness lay in
+seeing all hands busy at the counters, exhibiting the merchandise, and
+folding it up again. When they heard the six or eight voices of the
+young men and women glibly gabbling the consecrated phrases by which
+clerks reply to the remarks of customers, the day was fine to them,
+the weather beautiful! But on the really fine days, when the blue of
+the heavens brightened all Paris, and the Parisians walked about to
+enjoy themselves and cared for no "goods" but those they carried on
+their back, the day was overcast to the Rogrons. "Bad weather for
+sales," said that pair of imbeciles.
+
+The skill with which Rogron could tie up a parcel made him an object
+of admiration to all his apprentices. He could fold and tie and see
+all that happened in the street and in the farthest recesses of the
+shop by the time he handed the parcel to his customer with a "Here it
+is, madame; /nothing else/ to-day?" But the poor fool would have been
+ruined without his sister. Sylvie had common-sense and a genius for
+trade. She advised her brother in their purchases and would pitilessly
+send him to remote parts of France to save a trifle of cost. The
+shrewdness which all women more or less possess, not being employed in
+the service of her heart, had drifted into that of speculation. A
+business to pay for,--that thought was the mainspring which kept the
+machine going and gave it an infernal activity.
+
+Rogron was really only head-clerk; he understood nothing of his
+business as a whole; self-interest, that great motor of the mind, had
+failed in his case to instruct him. He was often aghast when his
+sister ordered some article to be sold below cost, foreseeing the end
+of its fashion; later he admired her idiotically for her cleverness.
+He reasoned neither ill nor well; he was simply incapable of reasoning
+at all; but he had the sense to subordinate himself to his sister, and
+he did so from a consideration that was outside of the business. "She
+is my elder," he said. Perhaps an existence like his, always solitary,
+reduced to the satisfaction of mere needs, deprived of money and all
+pleasures in youth, may explain to physiologists and thinkers the
+clownish expression of the face, the feebleness of mind, the vacant
+silliness of the man. His sister had steadily prevented him from
+marrying, afraid perhaps to lose her power over him, and seeing only a
+source of expense and injury in some woman who would certainly be
+younger and undoubtedly less ugly than herself.
+
+Silliness has two ways of comporting itself; it talks, or is silent.
+Silent silliness can be borne; but Rogron's silliness was loquacious.
+The man had a habit of chattering to his clerks, explaining the
+minutiae of the business, and ornamenting his talk with those flat
+jokes which may be called the "chaff" of shopkeeping. Rogron, listened
+to, of course, by his subordinates and perfectly satisfied with
+himself, had come at last into possession of a phraseology of his own.
+This chatterer believed himself an orator. The necessity of explaining
+to customers what they want, of guessing at their desires, and giving
+them desires for what they do not want, exercises the tongue of all
+retail shopkeepers. The petty dealer acquires the faculty of uttering
+words and sentences in which there is absolutely no meaning, but which
+have a marked success. He explains to his customers matters of
+manufacture that they know nothing of; that alone gives him a passing
+superiority over them; but take him away from his thousand and one
+explanations about his thousand and one articles, and he is,
+relatively to thought, like a fish out of water in the sun.
+
+Rogron and Sylvie, two mechanisms baptized by mistake, did not
+possess, latent or active, the feelings which give life to the heart.
+Their natures were shrivelled and harsh, hardened by toil, by
+privation, by the remembrance of their sufferings during a long and
+cruel apprenticeship to life. Neither of them complained of their
+trials. They were not so much implacable as impracticable in their
+dealings with others in misfortune. To them, virtue, honor, loyalty,
+all human sentiments consisted solely in the payment of their bills.
+Irritable and irritating, without feelings, and sordid in their
+economy, the brother and sister bore a dreadful reputation among the
+other merchants of the rue Saint-Denis. Had it not been for their
+connection with Provins, where they went three or four times a year,
+when they could close the shop for a day or two, they would have had
+no clerks or young women. But old Rogron, their father, sent them all
+the unfortunate young people of his neighborhood, whose parents wished
+to start them in business in Paris. He obtained these apprentices by
+boasting, out of vanity, of his son's success. Parents, attracted by
+the prospect of their children being well-trained and closely watched,
+and also, by the hope of their succeeding, eventually, to the
+business, sent whichever child was most in the way at home to the care
+of the brother and sister. But no sooner had the clerks or the young
+women found a way of escape from that dreadful establishment than they
+fled, with rejoicings that increased the already bad name of the
+Rogrons. New victims were supplied yearly by the indefatigable old
+father.
+
+From the time she was fifteen, Sylvie Rogron, trained to the simpering
+of a saleswoman, had two faces,--the amiable face of the seller, the
+natural face of a sour spinster. Her acquired countenance was a
+marvellous bit of mimicry. She was all smiles. Her voice, soft and
+wheedling, gave a commercial charm to business. Her real face was that
+we have already seen projecting from the half-opened blinds; the mere
+sight of her would have put to flight the most resolute Cossack of
+1815, much as that horde were said to like all kinds of Frenchwomen.
+
+When the letter from the Lorrains reached the brother and sister, they
+were in mourning for their father, from whom they inherited the house
+which had been as good as stolen from Pierrette's grandmother, also
+certain lands bought by their father, and certain moneys acquired by
+usurious loans and mortgages to the peasantry, whose bits of ground
+the old drunkard expected to possess. The yearly taking of stock was
+just over. The price of the "Family Sister" had, at last, been paid in
+full. The Rogrons owned about sixty thousand francs' worth of
+merchandise, forty thousand in a bank or in their cash-box, and the
+value of their business. Sitting on a bench covered with striped-green
+Utrecht velvet placed in a square recess just behind their private
+counter (the counter of their forewoman being similar and directly
+opposite) the brother and sister consulted as to what they should do.
+All retail shopkeepers aspire to become members of the bourgeoisie. By
+selling the good-will of their business, the pair would have over a
+hundred and fifty thousand francs, not counting the inheritance from
+their father. By placing their present available property in the
+public Funds, they would each obtain about four thousand francs a
+year, and by taking the proceeds of their business, when sold, they
+could repair and improve the house they inherited from their father,
+which would thus be a good investment. They could then go and live in
+a house of their own in Provins. Their forewoman was the daughter of a
+rich farmer at Donnemarie, burdened with nine children, to whom he had
+endeavored to give a good start in life, being aware that at his death
+his property, divided into nine parts, would be but little for any one
+of them. In five years, however, the man had lost seven children,--a
+fact which made the forewoman so interesting that Rogron had tried,
+unsuccessfully, to get her to marry him; but she showed an aversion
+for her master which baffled his manoeuvres. Besides, Mademoiselle
+Sylvie was not in favor of the match; in fact, she steadily opposed
+her brother's marriage, and sought, instead, to make the shrewd young
+woman their successor.
+
+No passing observer can form the least idea of the cryptogramic
+existence of a certain class of shopkeepers; he looks at them and asks
+himself, "On what, and why, do they live? whence have they come? where
+do they go?" He is lost in such questions, but finds no answer to
+them. To discover the false seed of poesy which lies in those heads
+and fructifies in those lives, it is necessary to dig into them; and
+when we do that we soon come to a thin subsoil beneath the surface.
+The Parisian shopkeeper nurtures his soul on some hope or other, more
+or less attainable, without which he would doubtless perish. One
+dreams of building or managing a theatre; another longs for the honors
+of mayoralty; this one desires a country-house, ten miles from Paris
+with a so-called "park," which he will adorn with statues of tinted
+plaster and fountains which squirt mere threads of water, but on which
+he will spend a mint of money; others, again, dream of distinction and
+a high grade in the National Guard. Provins, that terrestrial
+paradise, filled the brother and sister with the fanatical longings
+which all the lovely towns of France inspire in their inhabitants. Let
+us say it to the glory of La Champagne, this love is warranted.
+Provins, one of the most charming towns in all France, rivals
+Frangistan and the valley of Cashmere; not only does it contain the
+poesy of Saadi, the Persian Homer, but it offers many pharmaceutical
+treasures to medical science. The crusades brought roses from Jericho
+to this enchanting valley, where by chance they gained new charms
+while losing none of their colors. The Provins roses are known the
+world over. But Provins is not only the French Persia, it is also
+Baden, Aix, Cheltenham,--for it has medicinal springs. This was the
+spot which appeared from time to time before the eyes of the two
+shopkeepers in the muddy regions of Saint-Denis.
+
+After crossing the gray plains which lie between La Ferte-Gaucher and
+Provins, a desert and yet productive, a desert of wheat, you reach a
+hill. Suddenly you behold at your feet a town watered by two rivers;
+at the feet of the rock on which you stand stretches a verdant valley,
+full of enchanting lines and fugitive horizons. If you come from Paris
+you will pass through the whole length of Provins on the everlasting
+highroad of France, which here skirts the hillside and is encumbered
+with beggars and blind men, who will follow you with their pitiful
+voices while you try to examine the unexpected picturesqueness of the
+region. If you come from Troyes you will approach the town on the
+valley side. The chateau, the old town, and its former ramparts are
+terraced on the hillside, the new town is below. They go by the names
+of Upper and Lower Provins. The upper is an airy town with steep
+streets commanding fine views, surrounded by sunken road-ways and
+ravines filled with chestnut trees which gash the sides of the hill
+with their deep gulleys. The upper town is silent, clean, solemn,
+surmounted by the imposing ruins of the old chateau. The lower is a
+town of mills, watered by the Voulzie and the Durtain, two rivers of
+Brie, narrow, sluggish, and deep; a town of inns, shops, retired
+merchants; filled with diligences, travelling-carriages, and waggons.
+The two towns, or rather this town with its historical memories, its
+melancholy ruins, the gaiety of its valley, the romantic charm of its
+ravines filled with tangled shrubbery and wildflowers, its rivers
+banked with gardens, excites the love of all its children, who do as
+the Auvergnats, the Savoyards, in fact, all French folks do, namely,
+leave Provins to make their fortunes, and always return. "Die in one's
+form," the proverb made for hares and faithful souls, seems also the
+motto of a Provins native.
+
+Thus the two Rogrons thought constantly of their dear Provins. While
+Jerome sold his thread he saw the Upper town; as he piled up the cards
+on which were buttons he contemplated the valley; when he rolled and
+unrolled his ribbons he followed the shining rivers. Looking up at his
+shelves he saw the ravines where he had often escaped his father's
+anger and gone a-nutting or gathering blackberries. But the little
+square in the Lower town was the chief object of his thoughts; he
+imagined how he could improve his house: he dreamed of a new front,
+new bedrooms, a salon, a billiard-room, a dining-room, and the kitchen
+garden out of which he would make an English pleasure-ground, with
+lawns, grottos, fountains, and statuary. The bedrooms at present
+occupied by the brother and sister, on the second floor of a house
+with three windows front and six storeys high in the rue Saint-Denis,
+were furnished with the merest necessaries, yet no one in Paris had
+finer furniture than they--in fancy. When Jerome walked the streets he
+stopped short, struck with admiration at the handsome things in the
+upholsterers' windows, and at the draperies he coveted for his house.
+When he came home he would say to his sister: "I found in such a shop,
+such and such a piece of furniture that will just do for the salon."
+The next day he would buy another piece, and another, and so on. He
+rejected, the following month, the articles of the months before. The
+Budget itself, could not have paid for his architectural schemes. He
+wanted everything he saw, but abandoned each thing for the last thing.
+When he saw the balconies of new houses, when he studied external
+ornamentation, he thought all such things, mouldings, carvings, etc.,
+out of place in Paris. "Ah!" he would say, "those fine things would
+look much better at Provins." When he stood on his doorstep leaning
+against the lintel, digesting his morning meal, with a vacant eye, the
+mercer was gazing at the house of his fancy gilded by the sun of his
+dream; he walked in his garden; he heard the jet from his fountain
+falling in pearly drops upon a slab of limestone; he played on his own
+billiard-table; he gathered his own flowers.
+
+Sylvie, on the other hand, was thinking so deeply, pen in hand, that
+she forgot to scold the clerks; she was receiving the bourgeoisie of
+Provins, she was looking at herself in the mirrors of her salon, and
+admiring the beauties of a marvellous cap. The brother and sister
+began to think the atmosphere of the rue Saint-Denis unhealthy, and
+the smell of the mud in the markets made them long for the fragrance
+of the Provins roses. They were the victims of a genuine nostalgia,
+and also of a monomania, frustrated at present by the necessity of
+selling their tapes and bobbins before they could leave Paris. The
+promised land of the valley of Provins attracted these Hebrews all the
+more because they had really suffered, and for a long time, as they
+crossed breathlessly the sandy wastes of a mercer's business.
+
+The Lorrains' letter reached them in the midst of meditations inspired
+by this glorious future. They knew scarcely anything about their
+cousin, Pierrette Lorrain. Their father got possession of the Auffray
+property after they left home, and the old man said little to any one
+of his business affairs. They hardly remembered their aunt Lorrain. It
+took an hour of genealogical discussion before they made her out to be
+the younger sister of their own mother by the second marriage of their
+grandfather Auffray. It immediately struck them that this second
+marriage had been fatally injurious to their interests by dividing the
+Auffray property between two daughters. In times past they had heard
+their father, who was given to sneering, complain of it.
+
+The brother and sister considered the application of the Lorrains from
+the point of view of such reminiscences, which were not at all
+favorable for Pierrette. To take charge of an orphan, a girl, a
+cousin, who might become their legal heir in case neither of them
+married,--this was a matter that needed discussion. The question was
+considered and debated under all its aspects. In the first place, they
+had never seen Pierrette. Then, what a trouble it would be to have a
+young girl to look after. Wouldn't it commit them to some obligations
+towards her? Could they send the girl away if they did not like her?
+Besides, wouldn't they have to marry her? and if Jerome found a yoke-
+mate among the heiresses of Provins they ought to keep all their
+property for his children. A yokemate for Jerome, according to Sylvie,
+meant a stupid, rich and ugly girl who would let herself be governed.
+They decided to refuse the Lorrain request. Sylvie agreed to write the
+answer. Business being rather urgent just then she delayed writing,
+and the forewoman coming forward with an offer for the stock and good-
+will of the "Family Sister," which the brother and sister accepted,
+the matter went entirely out of the old maid's mind.
+
+Sylvie Rogron and her brother departed for Provins four years before
+the time when the coming of Brigaut threw such excitement into
+Pierrette's life. But the doings of the pair after their arrival at
+Provins are as necessary to relate as their life in Paris; for Provins
+was destined to be not less fatal to Pierrette than the commercial
+antecedents of her cousins!
+
+
+
+III
+
+PATHOLOGY OF RETIRED MERCERS
+
+When the petty shopkeeper who has come to Paris from the provinces
+returns to the provinces from Paris he brings with him a few ideas;
+then he loses them in the habits and ways of provincial life into
+which he plunges, and his reforming notions leave him. From this there
+do result, however, certain trifling, slow, successive changes by
+which Paris scratches the surface of the provincial towns. This
+process marks the transition of the ex-shopkeeper into the substantial
+bourgeois, but it acts like an illness upon him. No retail shopkeeper
+can pass with impunity from his perpetual chatter into dead silence,
+from his Parisian activity to the stillness of provincial life. When
+these worthy persons have laid by property they spend a portion of it
+on some desire over which they have long brooded and into which they
+now turn their remaining impulses, no longer restrained by force of
+will. Those who have not been nursing a fixed idea either travel or
+rush into the political interests of their municipality. Others take
+to hunting or fishing and torment their farmers or tenants; others
+again become usurers or stock-jobbers. As for the scheme of the
+Rogrons, brother and sister, we know what that was; they had to
+satisfy an imperious desire to handle the trowel and remodel their old
+house into a charming new one.
+
+This fixed idea produced upon the square of Lower Provins the front of
+the building which Brigaut had been examining; also the interior
+arrangements of the house and its handsome furniture. The contractor
+did not drive a nail without consulting the owners, without requiring
+them to sign the plans and specifications, without explaining to them
+at full length and in every detail the nature of each article under
+discussion, where it was manufactured, and what were its various
+prices. As to the choicer things, each, they were told, had been used
+by Monsieur Tiphaine, or Madame Julliard, or Monsieur the mayor, the
+notables of the place. The idea of having things done as the rich
+bourgeois of Provins did them carried the day for the contractor.
+
+"Oh, if Monsieur Garceland has it in his house, put it in," said
+Mademoiselle Rogron. "It must be all right; his taste is good."
+
+"Sylvie, see, he wants us to have ovolos in the cornice of the
+corridor."
+
+"Do you call those ovolos?"
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle."
+
+"What an odd name! I never heard it before."
+
+"But you have seen the thing?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you understand Latin?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, it means eggs--from the Latin /ovum/."
+
+"What queer fellows you are, you architects!" cried Rogron. "It is
+stepping on egg-shells to deal with you."
+
+"Shall we paint the corridor?" asked the builder.
+
+"Good heavens, no!" cried Sylvie. "That would be five hundred francs
+more!"
+
+"Oh, but the salon and the staircase are too pretty not to have the
+corridor decorated too," said the man. "That little Madame Lesourd had
+hers painted last year."
+
+"And now, her husband, as king's attorney, is obliged to leave
+Provins."
+
+"Ah, he'll be chief justice some of these days," said the builder.
+
+"How about Monsieur Tiphaine?"
+
+"Monsieur Tiphaine? he's got a pretty wife and is sure to get on.
+He'll go to Paris. Shall we paint the corridor?"
+
+"Yes, yes," said Rogron. "The Lesourds must be made to see that we are
+as good as they."
+
+The first year after the Rogrons returned to Provins was entirely
+taken up by such discussions, by the pleasure of watching the workmen,
+by the surprise occasioned to the townspeople and the replies to
+questions of all kinds which resulted therefrom, and also by the
+attempts made by Sylvie and her brother to be socially intimate with
+the principal families of Provins.
+
+The Rogrons had never gone into any society; they had never left their
+shop, knowing absolutely no one in Paris, and now they were athirst
+for the pleasures of social life. On their arrival in Provins they
+found their former masters in Paris (long since returned to the
+provinces), Monsieur and Madame Julliard, lately of the "Chinese
+Worm," their children and grandchildren; the Guepin family, or rather
+the Guepin clan, the youngest scion of which now kept the "Three
+Distaffs"; and thirdly, Madame Guenee from whom they had purchased the
+"Family Sister," and whose three daughters were married and settled in
+Provins. These three races, Julliard, Guepin, and Guenee, had spread
+through the town like dog-grass through a lawn. The mayor, Monsieur
+Garceland, was the son-in-law of Monsieur Guepin; the curate, Abbe
+Peroux, was own brother to Madame Julliard; the judge, Monsieur
+Tiphaine junior, was brother to Madame Guenee, who signed herself
+"/nee/ Tiphaine."
+
+The queen of the town was the beautiful Madame Tiphaine junior, only
+daughter of Madame Roguin, the rich wife of a former notary in Paris,
+whose name was never mentioned. Clever, delicate, and pretty, married
+in the provinces to please her mother, who for special reasons did not
+want her with her, and took her from a convent only a few days before
+the wedding, Melanie Tiphaine considered herself an exile in Provins,
+where she behaved to admiration. Handsomely dowered, she still had
+hopes. As for Monsieur Tiphaine, his old father had made to his eldest
+daughter Madame Guenee such advances on her inheritance that an estate
+worth eight thousand francs a year, situated within fifteen miles of
+Provins, was to come wholly to him. Consequently the Tiphaines would
+possess, sooner or later, some forty thousand francs a year, and were
+not "badly off," as they say. The one overwhelming desire of the
+beautiful Madame Tiphaine was to get Monsieur Tiphaine elected deputy.
+As deputy he would become a judge in Paris; and she was firmly
+resolved to push him up into the Royal courts. For these reasons she
+tickled all vanities and strove to please all parties; and--what is
+far more difficult--she succeeded. Twice a week she received the
+bourgeoisie of Provins at her house in the Upper town. This
+intelligent young woman of twenty had not as yet made a single blunder
+or misstep on the slippery path she had taken. She gratified
+everybody's self-love, and petted their hobbies; serious with the
+serious, a girl with girls, instinctively a mother with mothers, gay
+with young wives and disposed to help them, gracious to all,--in
+short, a pearl, a treasure, the pride of Provins. She had never yet
+said a word of her intentions and wishes, but all the electors of
+Provins were awaiting the time when their dear Monsieur Tiphaine had
+reached the required age for nomination. Every man in the place,
+certain of his own talents, regarded the future deputy as his
+particular friend, his protector. Of course, Monsieur Tiphaine would
+attain to honors; he would be Keeper of the Seals, and then, what
+wouldn't he do for Provins!
+
+Such were the pleasant means by which Madame Tiphaine had come to rule
+over the little town. Madame Guenee, Monsieur Tiphaine's sister, after
+having married her eldest daughter to Monsieur Lesourd, prosecuting
+attorney, her second to Monsieur Martener, the doctor, and the third
+to Monsieur Auffray, the notary, had herself married Monsieur
+Galardon, the collector. Mother and daughters all considered Monsieur
+Tiphaine as the richest and ablest man in the family. The prosecuting
+attorney had the strongest interest in sending his uncle to Paris,
+expecting to step into his shoes as judge of the local court of
+Provins. The four ladies formed a sort of court round Madame Tiphaine,
+whose ideas and advice they followed on all occasions. Monsieur
+Julliard, the eldest son of the old merchant, who had married the only
+daughter of a rich farmer, set up a sudden, secret, and disinterested
+passion for Madame Tiphaine, that angel descended from the Parisian
+skies. The clever Melanie, too clever to involve herself with
+Julliard, but quite capable of keeping him in the condition of Amadis
+and making the most of his folly, advised him to start a journal,
+intending herself to play the part of Egeria. For the last two years,
+therefore, Julliard, possessed by his romantic passion, had published
+the said newspaper, called the "Bee-hive," which contained articles
+literary, archaeological, and medical, written in the family. The
+advertisements paid expenses. The subscriptions, two hundred in all,
+made the profits. Every now and then melancholy verses, totally
+incomprehensible in La Brie, appeared, addressed, "TO HER!!!" with
+three exclamation marks. The clan Julliard was thus united to the
+other clans, and the salon of Madame Tiphaine became, naturally, the
+first in the town. The few aristocrats who lived in Provins were, of
+course, apart, and formed a single salon in the Upper town, at the
+house of the old Comtesse de Breautey.
+
+During the first six months of their transplantation, the Rogrons,
+favored by their former acquaintance with several of these people,
+were received, first by Madame Julliard the elder, and by the former
+Madame Guenee, now Madame Galardon (from whom they had bought their
+business), and next, after a good deal of difficulty, by Madame
+Tiphaine. All parties wished to study the Rogrons before admitting
+them. It was difficult, of course, to keep out merchants of the rue
+Saint-Denis, originally from Provins, who had returned to the town to
+spend their fortunes. Still, the object of all society is to
+amalgamate persons of equal wealth, education, manners, customs,
+accomplishments, and character. Now the Guepins, Guenees, and
+Julliards had a better position among the bourgeoisie than the
+Rogrons, whose father had been held in contempt on account of his
+private life, and his conduct in the matter of the Auffray property,--
+the facts of which were known to the notary Auffray, Madame Galardon's
+son-in-law.
+
+In the social life of these people, to which Madame Tiphaine had given
+a certain tone of elegance, all was homogeneous; the component parts
+understood each other, knew each other's characters, and behaved and
+conversed in a manner that was agreeable to all. The Rogrons flattered
+themselves that being received by Monsieur Garceland, the mayor, they
+would soon be on good terms with all the best families in the town.
+Sylvie applied herself to learn boston. Rogron, incapable of playing a
+game, twirled his thumbs and had nothing to say except to discourse on
+his new house. Words seemed to choke him; he would get up, try to
+speak, become frightened, and sit down again, with comical distortion
+of the lips. Sylvie naively betrayed her natural self at cards. Sharp,
+irritable, whining when she lost, insolent when she won, nagging and
+quarrelsome, she annoyed her partners as much as her adversaries, and
+became the scourge of society. And yet, possessed by a silly,
+unconcealed ambition, Rogron and his sister were bent on playing a
+part in the society of a little town already in possession of a close
+corporation of twelve allied families. Allowing that the restoration
+of their house had cost them thirty thousand francs, the brother and
+sister possessed between them at least ten thousand francs a year.
+This they considered wealth, and with it they endeavored to impress
+society, which immediately took the measure of their vulgarity, crass
+ignorance, and foolish envy. On the evening when they were presented
+to the beautiful Madame Tiphaine, who had already eyed them at Madame
+Garceland's and at Madame Julliard the elder's, the queen of the town
+remarked to Julliard junior, who stayed a few moments after the rest
+of the company to talk with her and her husband:--
+
+"You all seem to be taken with those Rogrons."
+
+"No, no," said Amadis, "they bore my mother and annoy my wife. When
+Mademoiselle Sylvie was apprenticed, thirty years ago, to my father,
+none of them could endure her."
+
+"I have a great mind," said Madame Tiphaine, putting her pretty foot
+on the bar of the fender, "to make it understood that my salon is not
+an inn."
+
+Julliard raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if to say, "Good heavens?
+what wit, what intellect!"
+
+"I wish my society to be select; and it certainly will not be if I
+admit those Rogrons."
+
+"They have neither heart, nor mind, nor manners"; said Monsieur
+Tiphaine. "If, after selling thread for twenty years, as my sister did
+for example--"
+
+"Your sister, my dear," said his wife in a parenthesis, "cannot be out
+of place in any salon."
+
+"--if," he continued, "people are stupid enough not to throw off the
+shop and polish their manners, if they don't know any better than to
+mistake the Counts of Champagne for the /accounts/ of a wine-shop, as
+Rogron did this evening, they had better, in my opinion, stay at
+home."
+
+"They are simply impudent," said Julliard. "To hear them talk you
+would suppose there was no other handsome house in Provins but theirs.
+They want to crush us; and after all, they have hardly enough to live
+on."
+
+"If it was only the brother," said Madame Tiphaine, "one might put up
+with him; he is not so aggressive. Give him a Chinese puzzle and he
+will stay in a corner quietly enough; it would take him a whole winter
+to find it out. But Mademoiselle Sylvie, with that voice like a hoarse
+hyena and those lobster-claws of hands! Don't repeat all this,
+Julliard."
+
+When Julliard had departed the little woman said to her husband:--
+
+"I have aborigines enough whom I am forced to receive; these two will
+fairly kill me. With your permission, I shall deprive myself of their
+society."
+
+"You are mistress in your own house," replied he; "but that will make
+enemies. The Rogrons will fling themselves into the opposition, which
+hitherto has had no real strength in Provins. That Rogron is already
+intimate with Baron Gouraud and the lawyer Vinet."
+
+"Then," said Melanie, laughing, "they will do you some service. Where
+there are no opponents, there is no triumph. A liberal conspiracy, an
+illegal cabal, a struggle of any kind, will bring you into the
+foreground."
+
+The justice looked at his young wife with a sort of alarmed
+admiration.
+
+The next day it was whispered about that the Rogrons had not
+altogether succeeded in Madame Tiphaine's salon. That lady's speech
+about an inn was immensely admired. It was a whole month before she
+returned Mademoiselle Sylvie's visit. Insolence of this kind is very
+much noticed in the provinces.
+
+During the evening which Sylvie had spent at Madame Tiphaine's a
+disagreeable scene occurred between herself and old Madame Julliard
+while playing boston, apropos of a trick which Sylvie declared the old
+lady had made her lose on purpose; for the old maid, who liked to trip
+others, could never endure the same game on herself. The next time she
+was invited out the mistress took care to make up the card-tables
+before she arrived; so that Sylvie was reduced to wandering from table
+to table as an onlooker, the players glancing at her with scornful
+eyes. At Madame Julliard senior's house, they played whist, a game
+Sylvie did not know.
+
+The old maid at last understood that she was under a ban; but she had
+no conception of the reason of it. She fancied herself an object of
+jealousy to all these persons. After a time she and her brother
+received no invitations, but they still persisted in paying evening
+visits. Satirical persons made fun of them,--not spitefully, but
+amusingly; inveigling them to talk absurdly about the eggs in their
+cornice, and their wonderful cellar of wine, the like of which was not
+in Provins.
+
+Before long the Rogron house was completely finished, and the brother
+and sister then resolved to give several sumptuous dinners, as much to
+return the civilities they had received as to exhibit their luxury.
+The invited guests accepted from curiosity only. The first dinner was
+given to the leading personages of the town; to Monsieur and Madame
+Tiphaine, with whom, however the Rogrons had never dined; to Monsieur
+and Madame Julliard, senior and junior; to Monsieur Lesourd, Monsieur
+le cure, and Monsieur and Madame Galardon. It was one of those
+interminable provincial dinners, where you sit at table from five to
+nine o'clock. Madame Tiphaine had introduced into Provins the Parisian
+custom of taking leave as soon as coffee had been served. On this
+occasion she had company at home and was anxious to get away. The
+Rogrons accompanied her husband and herself to the street door, and
+when they returned to the salon, disconcerted at not being able to
+keep their chief guests, the rest of the party were preparing to
+imitate Madame Tiphaine's fashion with cruel provincial promptness.
+
+"They won't see our salon lighted up," said Sylvie, "and that's the
+show of the house."
+
+The Rogrons had counted on surprising their guests. It was the first
+time any one had been admitted to the now celebrated house, and the
+company assembled at Madame Tiphaine's was eagerly awaiting her
+opinion of the marvels of the "Rogron palace."
+
+"Well!" cried little Madame Martener, "you've seen the Louvre; tell us
+all about it."
+
+"All? Well, it would be like the dinner,--not much."
+
+"But do describe it."
+
+"Well, to begin with, that front door, the gilded grating of which we
+have all admired," said Madame Tiphaine, "opens upon a long corridor
+which divides the house unequally; on the right side there is one
+window, on the other, two. At the garden end, the corridor opens with
+a glass door upon a portico with steps to the lawn, where there's a
+sun dial and a plaster statue of Spartacus, painted to imitate bronze.
+Behind the kitchen, the builder has put the staircase, and a sort of
+larder which we are spared the sight of. The staircase, painted to
+imitate black marble with yellow veins, turns upon itself like those
+you see in cafes leading from the ground-floor to the entresol. The
+balustrade, of walnut with brass ornaments and dangerously slight, was
+pointed out to us as one of the seven wonders of the world. The cellar
+stairs run under it. On the other side of the corridor is the dining-
+room, which communicates by folding-doors with a salon of equal size,
+the windows of which look on the garden."
+
+"Dear me, is there no ante-chamber?" asked Madame Auffray.
+
+"The corridor, full of draughts, answers for an ante-chamber," replied
+Madame Tiphaine. "Our friends have had, they assured us, the eminently
+national, liberal, constitutional, and patriotic feeling to use none
+but French woods in the house; so the floor in the dining-room is
+chestnut, the sideboards, tables, and chairs, of the same. White
+calico window-curtains, with red borders, are held back by vulgar red
+straps; these magnificent draperies run on wooden curtain rods ending
+in brass lion's-paws. Above one of the sideboards hangs a dial
+suspended by a sort of napkin in gilded bronze,--an idea that seemed
+to please the Rogrons hugely. They tried to make me admire the
+invention; all I could manage to say was that if it was ever proper to
+wrap a napkin round a dial it was certainly in a dining-room. On the
+sideboard were two huge lamps like those on the counter of a
+restaurant. Above the other sideboard hung a barometer, excessively
+ornate, which seems to play a great part in their existence; Rogron
+gazed at it as he might at his future wife. Between the two windows is
+a white porcelain stove in a niche overloaded with ornament. The walls
+glow with a magnificent paper, crimson and gold, such as you see in
+the same restaurants, where, no doubt, the Rogrons chose it. Dinner
+was served on white and gold china, with a dessert service of light
+blue with green flowers, but they showed us another service in
+earthenware for everyday use. Opposite to each sideboard was a large
+cupboard containing linen. All was clean, new, and horribly sharp in
+tone. However, I admit the dining-room; it has some character, though
+disagreeable; it represents that of the masters of the house. But
+there is no enduring the five engravings that hang on the walls; the
+Minister of the Interior ought really to frame a law against them. One
+was Poniatowski jumping into the Elster; the others, Napoleon pointing
+a cannon, the defence at Clichy, and the two Mazepas, all in gilt
+frames of the vulgarest description,--fit to carry off the prize of
+disgust. Oh! how much I prefer Madame Julliard's pastels of fruit,
+those excellent Louis XV. pastels, which are in keeping with the old
+dining-room and its gray panels,--defaced by age, it is true, but they
+possess the true provincial characteristics that go well with old
+family silver, precious china, and our simple habits. The provinces
+are provinces; they are only ridiculous when they mimic Paris. I
+prefer this old salon of my husband's forefathers, with its heavy
+curtains of green and white damask, the Louis XV. mantelpiece, the
+twisted pier-glasses, the old mirrors with their beaded mouldings, and
+the venerable card tables. Yes, I prefer my old Sevres vases in royal
+blue, mounted on copper, my clock with those impossible flowers, that
+rococco chandelier, and the tapestried furniture, to all the finery of
+the Rogron salon."
+
+"What is the salon like?" said Monsieur Martener, delighted with the
+praise the handsome Parisian bestowed so adroitly on the provinces.
+
+"As for the salon, it is all red,--the red Mademoiselle Sylvie turns
+when she loses at cards."
+
+"Sylvan-red," said Monsieur Tiphaine, whose sparkling saying long
+remained in the vocabulary of Provins.
+
+"Window-curtains, red; furniture, red; mantelpiece, red, veined
+yellow, candelabra and clock ditto mounted on bronze, common and heavy
+in design,--Roman standards with Greek foliage! Above the clock is
+that inevitable good-natured lion which looks at you with a simper,
+the lion of ornamentation, with a big ball under his feet, symbol of
+the decorative lion, who passes his life holding a black ball,--
+exactly like a deputy of the Left. Perhaps it is meant as a
+constitutional myth. The face of the clock is curious. The glass over
+the chimney is framed in that new fashion of applied mouldings which
+is so trumpery and vulgar. From the ceiling hangs a chandelier
+carefully wrapped in green muslin, and rightly too, for it is in the
+worst taste, the sharpest tint of bronze with hideous ornaments. The
+walls are covered with a red flock paper to imitate velvet enclosed in
+panels, each panel decorated with a chromo-lithograph in one of those
+frames festooned with stucco flowers to represent wood-carving. The
+furniture, in cashmere and elm-wood, consists, with classic
+uniformity, of two sofas, two easy-chairs, two armchairs, and six
+common chairs. A vase in alabaster, called a la Medicis, kept under
+glass stands on a table between the windows; before the windows, which
+are draped with magnificent red silk curtains and lace curtains under
+them, are card-tables. The carpet is Aubusson, and you may be sure the
+Rogrons did not fail to lay hands on that most vulgar of patterns,
+large flowers on a red ground. The room looks as if no one ever lived
+there; there are no books, no engravings, none of those little knick-
+knacks we all have lying about," added Madame Tiphaine, glancing at
+her own table covered with fashionable trifles, albums, and little
+presents given to her by friends; "and there are no flowers,--it is
+all cold and barren, like Mademoiselle Sylvie herself. Buffon says the
+style is the man, and certainly salons have styles of their own."
+
+From this sketch everybody can see the sort of house the brother and
+sister lived in, though they can never imagine the absurdities into
+which a clever builder dragged the ignorant pair,--new inventions,
+fantastic ornaments, a system for preventing smoky chimneys, another
+for preventing damp walls; painted marquetry panels on the staircase,
+colored glass, superfine locks,--in short, all those vulgarities which
+make a house expensive and gratify the bourgeois taste.
+
+No one chose to visit the Rogrons, whose social plans thus came to
+nothing. Their invitations were refused under various excuses,--the
+evenings were already engaged to Madame Garceland and the other ladies
+of the Provins world. The Rogrons had supposed that all that was
+required to gain a position in society was to give a few dinners. But
+no one any longer accepted them, except a few young men who went to
+make fun of their host and hostess, and certain diners-out who went
+everywhere.
+
+Frightened at the loss of forty thousand francs swallowed up without
+profit in what she called her "dear house," Sylvie now set to work to
+recover it by economy. She gave no more dinners, which had cost her
+forty or fifty francs without the wines, and did not fulfil her social
+hopes, hopes that are as hard to realize in the provinces as in Paris.
+She sent away her cook, took a country-girl to do the menial work, and
+did her own cooking, as she said, "for pleasure."
+
+Fourteen months after their return to Provins, the brother and sister
+had fallen into a solitary and wholly unoccupied condition. Their
+banishment from society roused in Sylvie's heart a dreadful hatred
+against the Tiphaines, Julliards and all the other members of the
+social world of Provins, which she called "the clique," and with whom
+her personal relations became extremely cold. She would gladly have
+set up a rival clique, but the lesser bourgeoisie was made up of
+either small shopkeepers who were only free on Sundays and fete-days,
+or smirched individuals like the lawyer Vinet and Doctor Neraud, and
+wholly inadmissible Bonapartists like Baron Gouraud, with whom,
+however, Rogron thoughtlessly allied himself, though the upper
+bourgeoisie had warned him against them.
+
+The brother and sister were, therefore, forced to sit by the fire of
+the stove in the dining-room, talking over their former business,
+trying to recall the faces of their customers and other matters they
+had intended to forget. By the end of the second winter ennui weighed
+heavily on them. They did not know how to get through each day;
+sometimes as they went to bed the words escaped them, "There's another
+over!" They dragged out the morning by staying in bed, and dressing
+slowly. Rogron shaved himself every day, examined his face, consulted
+his sister on any changes he thought he saw there, argued with the
+servant about the temperature of his hot water, wandered into the
+garden, looked to see if the shrubs were budding, sat at the edge of
+the water where he had built himself a kiosk, examined the joinery of
+his house,--had it sprung? had the walls settled, the panels cracked?
+or he would come in fretting about a sick hen, and complaining to his
+sister, who was nagging the servant as she set the table, of the
+dampness which was coming out in spots upon the plaster. The barometer
+was Rogron's most useful bit of property. He consulted it at all
+hours, tapped it familiarly like a friend, saying: "Vile weather!" to
+which his sister would reply, "Pooh! it is only seasonable." If any
+one called to see him the excellence of that instrument was his chief
+topic of conversation.
+
+Breakfast took up some little time; with what deliberation those two
+human beings masticated their food! Their digestions were perfect;
+cancer of the stomach was not to be dreaded by them. They managed to
+get along till twelve o'clock by reading the "Bee-hive" and the
+"Constitutionnel." The cost of subscribing to the Parisian paper was
+shared by Vinet the lawyer, and Baron Gouraud. Rogron himself carried
+the paper to Gouraud, who had been a colonel and lived on the square,
+and whose long yarns were Rogron's delight; the latter sometimes
+puzzled over the warnings he had received, and asked himself how such
+a lively companion could be dangerous. He was fool enough to tell the
+colonel he had been warned against him, and to repeat all the "clique"
+had said. God knows how the colonel, who feared no one, and was
+equally to be dreaded with pistols or a sword, gave tongue about
+Madame Tiphaine and her Amadis, and the ministerialists of the Upper
+town, persons capable of any villany to get places, and who counted
+the votes at elections to suit themselves, etc.
+
+About two o'clock Rogron started for a little walk. He was quite happy
+if some shopkeeper standing on the threshold of his door would stop
+him and say, "Well, pere Rogron, how goes it with /you/?" Then he
+would talk, and ask for news, and gather all the gossip of the town.
+He usually went as far as the Upper town, sometimes to the ravines,
+according to the weather. Occasionally he would meet old men taking
+their walks abroad like himself. Such meetings were joyful events to
+him. There happened to be in Provins a few men weary of Parisian life,
+quiet scholars who lived with their books. Fancy the bewilderment of
+the ignorant Rogron when he heard a deputy-judge named Desfondrilles,
+more of an archaeologist than a magistrate, saying to old Monsieur
+Martener, a really learned man, as he pointed to the valley:--
+
+"Explain to me why the idlers of Europe go to Spa instead of coming to
+Provins, when the springs here have a superior curative value
+recognized by the French faculty,--a potential worthy of the medicinal
+properties of our roses."
+
+"That is one of the caprices of caprice," said the old gentleman.
+"Bordeaux wine was unknown a hundred years ago. Marechal de Richelieu,
+one of the noted men of the last century, the French Alcibiades, was
+appointed governor of Guyenne. His lungs were diseased, and, heaven
+knows why! the wine of the country did him good and he recovered.
+Bordeaux instantly made a hundred millions; the marshal widened its
+territory to Angouleme, to Cahors,--in short, to over a hundred miles
+of circumference! it is hard to tell where the Bordeaux vineyards end.
+And yet they haven't erected an equestrian statue to the marshal in
+Bordeaux!"
+
+"Ah! if anything of that kind happens to Provins," said Monsieur
+Desfondrilles, "let us hope that somewhere in the Upper or Lower town
+they will set up a bas-relief of the head of Monsieur Opoix, the
+re-discoverer of the mineral waters of Provins."
+
+"My dear friend, the revival of Provins is impossible," replied
+Monsieur Martener; "the town was made bankrupt long ago."
+
+"What!" cried Rogron, opening his eyes very wide.
+
+"It was once a capital, holding its own against Paris in the twelfth
+century, when the Comtes de Champagne held their court here, just as
+King Rene held his in Provence," replied the man of learning; "for in
+those days civilization, gaiety, poesy, elegance, and women, in short
+all social splendors, were not found exclusively in Paris. It is as
+difficult for towns and cities as it is for commercial houses to
+recover from ruin. Nothing is left to us of the old Provins but the
+fragrance of our historical glory and that of our roses,--and a sub-
+prefecture!"
+
+"Ah! what mightn't France be if she had only preserved her feudal
+capitals!" said Desfondrilles. "Can sub-prefects replace the poetic,
+gallant, warlike race of the Thibaults who made Provins what Ferrara
+was to Italy, Weimar to Germany,--what Munich is trying to be to-day."
+
+"Was Provins ever a capital?" asked Rogron.
+
+"Why! where do you come from?" exclaimed the archaeologist. "Don't you
+know," he added, striking the ground of the Upper town where they
+stood with his cane, "don't you know that the whole of this part of
+Provins is built on catacombs?"
+
+"Catacombs?"
+
+"Yes, catacombs, the extent and height of which are yet undiscovered.
+They are like the naves of cathedrals, and there are pillars in them."
+
+"Monsieur is writing a great archaeological work to explain these
+strange constructions," interposed Monsieur Martener, seeing that the
+deputy-judge was about to mount his hobby.
+
+Rogron came home much comforted to know that his house was in the
+valley. The crypts of Provins kept him occupied for a week in
+explorations, and gave a topic of conversation to the unhappy
+celibates for many evenings.
+
+In the course of these ramblings Rogron picked up various bits of
+information about Provins, its inhabitants, their marriages, together
+with stale political news; all of which he narrated to his sister.
+Scores of times in his walks he would stop and say,--often to the same
+person on the same day,--"Well, what's the news?" When he reached home
+he would fling himself on the sofa like a man exhausted with labor,
+whereas he was only worn out with the burden of his own dulness.
+Dinner came at last, after he had gone twenty times to the kitchen and
+back, compared the clocks, and opened and shut all the doors of the
+house. So long as the brother and sister could spend their evenings in
+paying visits they managed to get along till bedtime; but after they
+were compelled to stay at home those evenings became like a parching
+desert. Sometimes persons passing through the quiet little square
+would hear unearthly noises as though the brother were throttling the
+sister; a moment's listening would show that they were only yawning.
+These two human mechanisms, having nothing to grind between their
+rusty wheels, were creaking and grating at each other. The brother
+talked of marrying, but only in despair. He felt old and weary; the
+thought of a woman frightened him. Sylvie, who began to see the
+necessity of having a third person in the home, suddenly remembered
+the little cousin, about whom no one in Provins had yet inquired, the
+friends of Madame Lorrain probably supposing that mother and child
+were both dead.
+
+Sylvie Rogron never lost anything; she was too thoroughly an old maid
+even to mislay the smallest article; but she pretended to have
+suddenly found the Lorrains' letter, so as to mention Pierrette
+naturally to her brother, who was greatly pleased at the possibility
+of having a little girl in the house. Sylvie replied to Madame
+Lorrain's letter half affectionately, half commercially, as one may
+say, explaining the delay by their change of abode and the settlement
+of their affairs. She seemed desirous of receiving her little cousin,
+and hinted that Pierrette would perhaps inherit twelve thousand francs
+a year if her brother Jerome did not marry.
+
+Perhaps it is necessary to have been, like Nebuchadnezzar, something
+of a wild beast, and shut up in a cage at the Jardin des Plantes
+without other prey than the butcher's meat doled out by the keeper, or
+a retired merchant deprived of the joys of tormenting his clerks, to
+understand the impatience with which the brother and sister awaited
+the arrival of their cousin Lorrain. Three days after the letter had
+gone, the pair were already asking themselves when she would get
+there.
+
+Sylvie perceived in her spurious benevolence towards her poor cousin a
+means of recovering her position in the social world of Provins. She
+accordingly went to call on Madame Tiphaine, of whose reprobation she
+was conscious, in order to impart the fact of Pierrette's approaching
+arrival,--deploring the girl's unfortunate position, and posing
+herself as being only too happy to succor her and give her a position
+as daughter and future heiress.
+
+"You have been rather long in discovering her," said Madame Tiphaine,
+with a touch of sarcasm.
+
+A few words said in a low voice by Madame Garceland, while the cards
+were being dealt, recalled to the minds of those who heard her the
+shameful conduct of old Rogron about the Auffray property; the notary
+explained the iniquity.
+
+"Where is the little girl now?" asked Monsieur Tiphaine, politely.
+
+"In Brittany," said Rogron.
+
+"Brittany is a large place," remarked Monsieur Lesourd.
+
+"Her grandfather and grandmother Lorrain wrote to us--when was that,
+my dear?" said Rogron addressing his sister.
+
+Sylvie, who was just then asking Madame Garceland where she had bought
+the stuff for her gown, answered hastily, without thinking of the
+effect of her words:--
+
+"Before we sold the business."
+
+"And have you only just answered the letter, mademoiselle?" asked the
+notary.
+
+Sylvie turned as red as a live coal.
+
+"We wrote to the Institution of Saint-Jacques," remarked Rogron.
+
+"That is a sort of hospital or almshouse for old people," said
+Monsieur Desfondrilles, who knew Nantes. "She can't be there; they
+receive no one under sixty."
+
+"She is there, with her grandmother Lorrain," said Rogron.
+
+"Her mother had a little fortune, the eight thousand francs which your
+father--no, I mean of course your grandfather--left to her," said the
+notary, making the blunder intentionally.
+
+"Ah!" said Rogron, stupidly, not understanding the notary's sarcasm.
+
+"Then you know nothing about your cousin's position or means?" asked
+Monsieur Tiphaine.
+
+"If Monsieur Rogron had known it," said the deputy-judge, "he would
+never have left her all this time in an establishment of that kind. I
+remember now that a house in Nantes belonging to Monsieur and Madame
+Lorrain was sold under an order of the court, and that Mademoiselle
+Lorrain's claim was swallowed up. I know this, for I was commissioner
+at the time."
+
+The notary spoke of Colonel Lorrain, who, had he lived, would have
+been much amazed to know that his daughter was in such an institution.
+The Rogrons beat a retreat, saying to each other that the world was
+very malicious. Sylvie perceived that the news of her benevolence had
+missed its effect,--in fact, she had lost ground in all minds; and she
+felt that henceforth she was forbidden to attempt an intimacy with the
+upper class of Provins. After this evening the Rogrons no longer
+concealed their hatred of that class and all its adherents. The
+brother told the sister the scandals that Colonel Gouraud and the
+lawyer Vinet had put into his head about the Tiphaines, the Guenees,
+the Garcelands, the Julliards, and others:--
+
+"I declare, Sylvie, I don't see why Madame Tiphaine should turn up her
+nose at shopkeeping in the rue Saint-Denis; it is more honest than
+what she comes from. Madame Roguin, her mother, is cousin to those
+Guillaumes of the 'Cat-playing-ball' who gave up the business to
+Joseph Lebas, their son-in-law. Her father is that Roguin who failed
+in 1819, and ruined the house of Cesar Birotteau. Madame Tiphaine's
+fortune was stolen,--for what else are you to call it when a notary's
+wife who is very rich lets her husband make a fraudulent bankruptcy?
+Fine doings! and she marries her daughter in Provins to get her out of
+the way,--all on account of her own relations with du Tillet. And such
+people set up to be proud! Well, well, that's the world!"
+
+On the day when Jerome Rogron and his sister began to declaim against
+"the clique" they were, without being aware of it, on the road to
+having a society of their own; their house was to become a rendezvous
+for other interests seeking a centre,--those of the hitherto floating
+elements of the liberal party in Provins. And this is how it came
+about: The launch of the Rogrons in society had been watched with
+great curiosity by Colonel Gouraud and the lawyer Vinet, two men drawn
+together, first by their ostracism, next by their opinions. They both
+professed patriotism and for the same reason,--they wished to become
+of consequence. The Liberals in Provins were, so far, confined to one
+old soldier who kept a cafe, an innkeeper, Monsieur Cournant a notary,
+Doctor Neraud, and a few stray persons, mostly farmers or those who
+had bought lands of the public domain.
+
+The colonel and the lawyer, delighted to lay hands on a fool whose
+money would be useful to their schemes, and who might himself, in
+certain cases, be made to bell the cat, while his house would serve as
+a meeting-ground for the scattered elements of the party, made the
+most of the Rogrons' ill-will against the upper classes of the place.
+The three had already a slight tie in their united subscription to the
+"Constitutionnel"; it would certainly not be difficult for the colonel
+to make a Liberal of the ex-mercer, though Rogron knew so little of
+politics that he was capable of regarding the exploits of Sergeant
+Mercier as those of a brother shopkeeper.
+
+The expected arrival of Pierrette brought to sudden fruition the
+selfish ideas of the two men, inspired as they were by the folly and
+ignorance of the celibates. Seeing that Sylvie had lost all chance of
+establishing herself in the good society of the place, an afterthought
+came to the colonel. Old soldiers have seen so many horrors in all
+lands, so many grinning corpses on battle-fields, that no
+physiognomies repel them; and Gouraud began to cast his eyes on the
+old maid's fortune. This imperial colonel, a short, fat man, wore
+enormous rings in ears that were bushy with tufts of hair. His sparse
+and grizzled whiskers were called in 1799 "fins." His jolly red face
+was rather discolored, like those of all who had lived to tell of the
+Beresina. The lower half of his big, pointed stomach marked the
+straight line which characterizes a cavalry officer. Gouraud had
+commanded the Second Hussars. His gray moustache hid a huge blustering
+mouth,--if we may use a term which alone describes that gulf. He did
+not eat his food, he engulfed it. A sabre cut had slit his nose, by
+which his speech was made thick and very nasal, like that attributed
+to Capuchins. His hands, which were short and broad, were of the kind
+that make women say: "You have the hands of a rascal." His legs seemed
+slender for his torso. In that fat and active body an absolutely
+lawless spirit disported itself, and a thorough experience of the
+things of life, together with a profound contempt for social
+convention, lay hidden beneath the apparent indifference of a soldier.
+Colonel Gouraud wore the cross of an officer of the Legion of honor,
+and his emoluments from that, together with his salary as a retired
+officer, gave him in all about three thousand francs a year.
+
+The lawyer, tall and thin, had liberal opinions in place of talent,
+and his only revenue was the meagre profits of his office. In Provins
+lawyers plead their own cases. The court was unfavorable to Vinet on
+account of his opinions; consequently, even the farmers who were
+Liberals, when it came to lawsuits preferred to employ some lawyer who
+was more congenial to the judges. Vinet was regarded with disfavor in
+other ways. He was said to have seduced a rich girl in the
+neighborhood of Coulommiers, and thus have forced her parents to marry
+her to him. Madame Vinet was a Chargeboeuf, an old and noble family of
+La Brie, whose name comes from the exploit of a squire during the
+expedition of Saint Louis to Egypt. She incurred the displeasure of
+her father and mother, who arranged, unknown to Vinet, to leave their
+entire fortune to their son, doubtless charging him privately, to pay
+over a portion of it to his sister's children.
+
+Thus the first bold effort of the ambitious man was a failure. Pursued
+by poverty, and ashamed not to give his wife the means of making a
+suitable appearance, he had made desperate efforts to enter public
+life, but the Chargeboeuf family refused him their influence. These
+Royalists disapproved, on moral grounds, of his forced marriage;
+besides, he was named Vinet, and how could they be expected to protect
+a plebian? Thus he was driven from branch to branch when he tried to
+get some good out of his marriage. Repulsed by every one, filled with
+hatred for the family of his wife, for the government which denied him
+a place, for the social world of Provins, which refused to admit him,
+Vinet submitted to his fate; but his gall increased. He became a
+Liberal in the belief that his fortune might yet be made by the
+triumph of the opposition, and he lived in a miserable little house in
+the Upper town from which his wife seldom issued. Madame Vinet had
+found no one to defend her since her marriage except an old Madame de
+Chargeboeuf, a widow with one daughter, who lived at Troyes. The
+unfortunate young woman, destined for better things, was absolutely
+alone in her home with a single child.
+
+There are some kinds of poverty which may be nobly accepted and gaily
+borne; but Vinet, devoured by ambition, and feeling himself guilty
+towards his wife, was full of darkling rage; his conscience grew
+elastic; and he finally came to think any means of success
+permissible. His young face changed. Persons about the courts were
+sometimes frightened as they looked at his viperish, flat head, his
+slit mouth, his eyes gleaming through glasses, and heard his sharp,
+persistent voice which rasped their nerves. His muddy skin, with its
+sickly tones of green and yellow, expressed the jaundice of his balked
+ambition, his perpetual disappointments and his hidden wretchedness.
+He could talk and argue; he was well-informed and shrewd, and was not
+without smartness and metaphor. Accustomed to look at everything from
+the standpoint of his own success, he was well fitted for a
+politician. A man who shrinks from nothing so long as it is legal, is
+strong; and Vinet's strength lay there.
+
+This future athlete of parliamentary debate, who was destined to share
+in proclaiming the dynasty of the house of Orleans had a terrible
+influence on Pierrette's fate. At the present moment he was bent on
+making for himself a weapon by founding a newspaper at Provins. After
+studying the Rogrons at a distance (the colonel aiding him) he had
+come to the conclusion that the brother might be made useful. This
+time he was not mistaken; his days of poverty were over, after seven
+wretched years, when even his daily bread was sometimes lacking. The
+day when Gouraud told him in the little square that the Rogrons had
+finally quarrelled with the bourgeois aristocracy of the Upper town,
+he nudged the colonel in the ribs significantly, and said, with a
+knowing look:--
+
+"One woman or another--handsome or ugly--/you/ don't care; marry
+Mademoiselle Rogron and we can organize something at once."
+
+"I have been thinking of it," replied Gouraud, "but the fact is they
+have sent for the daughter of Colonel Lorrain, and she's their next of
+kin."
+
+"You can get them to make a will in your favor. Ha! you would get a
+very comfortable house."
+
+"As for the little girl--well, well, let's see her," said the colonel,
+with a leering and thoroughly wicked look, which proved to a man of
+Vinet's quality how little respect the old trooper could feel for any
+girl.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+PIERRETTE
+
+After her grandfather and grandmother entered the sort of hospital in
+which they sadly expected to end their days, Pierrette, being young
+and proud, suffered so terribly at living there on charity that she
+was thankful when she heard she had rich relations. When Brigaut, the
+son of her mother's friend the major, and the companion of her
+childhood, who was learning his trade as a cabinet-maker at Nantes,
+heard of her departure he offered her the money to pay her way to
+Paris in the diligence,--sixty francs, the total of his /pour-boires/
+as an apprentice, slowly amassed, and accepted by Pierrette with the
+sublime indifference of true affection, showing that in a like case
+she herself would be affronted by thanks.
+
+Brigaut was in the habit of going every Sunday to Saint-Jacques to
+play with Pierrette and try to console her. The vigorous young workman
+knew the dear delight of bestowing a complete and devoted protection
+on an object involuntarily chosen by his heart. More than once he and
+Pierrette, sitting on Sundays in a corner of the garden, had
+embroidered the veil of the future with their youthful projects; the
+apprentice, armed with his plane, scoured the world to make their
+fortune, while Pierrette waited.
+
+In October, 1824, when the child had completed her eleventh year, she
+was entrusted by the two old people and by Brigaut, all three
+sorrowfully sad, to the conductor of the diligence from Nantes to
+Paris, with an entreaty to put her safely on the diligence from Paris
+to Provins and to take good care of her. Poor Brigaut! he ran like a
+dog after the coach looking at his dear Pierrette as long as he was
+able. In spite of her signs he ran over three miles, and when at last
+he was exhausted his eyes, wet with tears, still followed her. She,
+too, was crying when she saw him no longer running by her, and putting
+her head out of the window she watched him, standing stock-still and
+looking after her, as the lumbering vehicle disappeared.
+
+The Lorrains and Brigaut knew so little of life that the girl had not
+a penny when she arrived in Paris. The conductor, to whom she had
+mentioned her rich friends, paid her expenses at the hotel, and made
+the conductor of the Provins diligence pay him, telling him to take
+good care of the girl and to see that the charges were paid by the
+family, exactly as though she were a case of goods. Four days after
+her departure from Nantes, about nine o'clock of a Monday night, a
+kind old conductor of the Messageries-royales, took Pierrette by the
+hand, and while the porters were discharging in the Grand'Rue the
+packages and passengers for Provins, he led the little girl, whose
+only baggage was a bundle containing two dresses, two chemises, and
+two pairs of stockings, to Mademoiselle Rogron's house, which was
+pointed out to him by the director at the coach office.
+
+"Good-evening, mademoiselle and the rest of the company. I've brought
+you a cousin, and here she is; and a nice little girl too, upon my
+word. You have forty-seven francs to pay me, and sign my book."
+
+Mademoiselle Sylvie and her brother were dumb with pleasure and
+amazement.
+
+"Excuse me," said the conductor, "the coach is waiting. Sign my book
+and pay me forty-seven francs, sixty centimes, and whatever you please
+for myself and the conductor from Nantes; we've taken care of the
+little girl as if she were our own; and paid for her beds and her
+food, also her fare to Provins, and other little things."
+
+"Forty-seven francs, twelve sous!" said Sylvie.
+
+"You are not going to dispute it?" cried the man.
+
+"Where's the bill?" said Rogron.
+
+"Bill! look at the book."
+
+"Stop talking, and pay him," said Sylvie, "You see there's nothing
+else to be done."
+
+Rogron went to get the money, and gave the man forty-seven francs,
+twelve sous.
+
+"And nothing for my comrade and me?" said the conductor.
+
+Sylvie took two francs from the depths of the old velvet bag which
+held her keys.
+
+"Thank you, no," said the man; "keep 'em yourself. We would rather
+care for the little one for her own sake." He picked up his book and
+departed, saying to the servant-girl: "What a pair! it seems there are
+crocodiles out of Egypt!"
+
+"Such men are always brutal," said Sylvie, who overhead the words.
+
+"They took good care of the little girl, anyhow," said Adele with her
+hands on her hips.
+
+"We don't have to live with him," remarked Rogron.
+
+"Where's the little one to sleep?" asked Adele.
+
+Such was the arrival of Pierrette Lorrain in the home of her cousins,
+who gazed at her with stolid eyes; she was tossed to them like a
+package, with no intermediate state between the wretched chamber at
+Saint-Jacques and the dining-room of her cousins, which seemed to her
+a palace. She was shy and speechless. To all other eyes than those of
+the Rogrons the little Breton girl would have seemed enchanting as she
+stood there in her petticoat of coarse blue flannel, with a pink
+cambric apron, thick shoes, blue stockings, and a white kerchief, her
+hands being covered by red worsted mittens edged with white, bought
+for her by the conductor. Her dainty Breton cap (which had been washed
+in Paris, for the journey from Nantes had rumpled it) was like a halo
+round her happy little face. This national cap, of the finest lawn,
+trimmed with stiffened lace pleated in flat folds, deserves
+description, it was so dainty and simple. The light coming through the
+texture and the lace produced a partial shadow, the soft shadow of a
+light upon the skin, which gave her the virginal grace that all
+painters seek and Leopold Robert found for the Raffaelesque face of
+the woman who holds a child in his picture of "The Gleaners." Beneath
+this fluted frame of light sparkled a white and rosy and artless face,
+glowing with vigorous health. The warmth of the room brought the blood
+to the cheeks, to the tips of the pretty ears, to the lips and the end
+of the delicate nose, making the natural white of the complexion
+whiter still.
+
+"Well, are you not going to say anything? I am your cousin Sylvie, and
+that is your cousin Rogron."
+
+"Do you want something to eat?" asked Rogron.
+
+"When did you leave Nantes?" asked Sylvie.
+
+"Is she dumb?" said Rogron.
+
+"Poor little dear, she has hardly any clothes," cried Adele, who had
+opened the child's bundle, tied up in a handkerchief of the old
+Lorrains.
+
+"Kiss your cousin," said Sylvie.
+
+Pierrette kissed Rogron.
+
+"Kiss your cousin," said Rogron.
+
+Pierrette kissed Sylvie.
+
+"She is tired out with her journey, poor little thing; she wants to go
+to sleep," said Adele.
+
+Pierrette was overcome with a sudden and invincible aversion for her
+two relatives,--a feeling that no one had ever before excited in her.
+Sylvie and the maid took her up to bed in the room where Brigaut
+afterwards noticed the white cotton curtain. In it was a little bed
+with a pole painted blue, from which hung a calico curtain; a walnut
+bureau without a marble top, a small table, a looking-glass, a very
+common night-table without a door, and three chairs completed the
+furniture of the room. The walls, which sloped in front, were hung
+with a shabby paper, blue with black flowers. The tiled floor, stained
+red and polished, was icy to the feet. There was no carpet except for
+a strip at the bedside. The mantelpiece of common marble was adorned
+by a mirror, two candelabra in copper-gilt, and a vulgar alabaster cup
+in which two pigeons, forming handles, were drinking.
+
+"You will be comfortable here, my little girl?" said Sylvie.
+
+"Oh, it's beautiful!" said the child, in her silvery voice.
+
+"She's not difficult to please," muttered the stout servant. "Sha'n't
+I warm her bed?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," said Sylvie, "the sheets may be damp."
+
+Adele brought one of her own night-caps when she returned with the
+warming-pan, and Pierrette, who had never slept in anything but the
+coarsest linen sheets, was amazed at the fineness and softness of the
+cotton ones. When she was fairly in bed and tucked up, Adele, going
+downstairs with Sylvie, could not refrain from saying, "All she has
+isn't worth three francs, mademoiselle."
+
+Ever since her economical regime began, Sylvie had compelled the maid
+to sit in the dining-room so that one fire and one lamp could do for
+all; except when Colonel Gouraud and Vinet came, on which occasions
+Adele was sent to the kitchen.
+
+Pierrette's arrival enlivened the rest of the evening.
+
+"We must get her some clothes to-morrow," said Sylvie; "she has
+absolutely nothing."
+
+"No shoes but those she had on, which weigh a pound," said Adele.
+
+"That's always so, in their part of the country," remarked Rogron.
+
+"How she looked at her room! though it really isn't handsome enough
+for a cousin of yours, mademoiselle."
+
+"It is good enough; hold your tongue," said Sylvie.
+
+"Gracious, what chemises! coarse enough to scratch her skin off; not a
+thing can she use here," said Adele, emptying the bundle.
+
+Master, mistress, and servant were busy till past ten o'clock,
+deciding what cambric they should buy for the new chemises, how many
+pairs of stockings, how many under-petticoats, and what material, and
+in reckoning up the whole cost of Pierrette's outfit.
+
+"You won't get off under three hundred francs," said Rogron, who could
+remember the different prices, and add them up from his former shop-
+keeping habit.
+
+"Three hundred francs!" cried Sylvie.
+
+"Yes, three hundred. Add it up."
+
+The brother and sister went over the calculation once more, and found
+the cost would be fully three hundred francs, not counting the making.
+
+"Three hundred francs at one stroke!" said Sylvie to herself as she
+got into bed.
+
+*****
+
+Pierrette was one of those children of love whom love endows with its
+tenderness, its vivacity, its gaiety, its nobility, its devotion.
+Nothing had so far disturbed or wounded a heart that was delicate as
+that of a fawn, but which was now painfully repressed by the cold
+greeting of her cousins. If Brittany had been full of outward misery,
+at least it was full of love. The old Lorrains were the most incapable
+of merchants, but they were also the most loving, frank, caressing, of
+friends, like all who are incautious and free from calculation. Their
+little granddaughter had received no other education at Pen-Hoel than
+that of nature. Pierrette went where she liked, in a boat on the pond,
+or roaming the village and the fields with Jacques Brigaut, her
+comrade, exactly as Paul and Virginia might have done. Petted by
+everybody, free as air, they gaily chased the joys of childhood. In
+summer they ran to watch the fishing, they caught the many-colored
+insects, they gathered flowers, they gardened; in winter they made
+slides, they built snow-men or huts, or pelted each other with
+snowballs. Welcomed by all, they met with smiles wherever they went.
+
+When the time came to begin their education, disasters came, too.
+Jacques, left without means at the death of his father, was
+apprenticed by his relatives to a cabinet-maker, and fed by charity,
+as Pierrette was soon to be at Saint-Jacques. Until the little girl
+was taken with her grandparents to that asylum, she had known nothing
+but fond caresses and protection from every one. Accustomed to confide
+in so much love, the little darling missed in these rich relatives, so
+eagerly desired, the kindly looks and ways which all the world, even
+strangers and the conductors of the coaches, had bestowed upon her.
+Her bewilderment, already great, was increased by the moral atmosphere
+she had entered. The heart turns suddenly cold or hot like the body.
+The poor child wanted to cry, without knowing why; but being very
+tired she went to sleep.
+
+The next morning, Pierrette being, like all country children,
+accustomed to get up early, was awake two hours before the cook. She
+dressed herself, stepping on tiptoe about her room, looked out at the
+little square, started to go downstairs and was struck with amazement
+by the beauties of the staircase. She stopped to examine all its
+details: the painted walls, the brasses, the various ornamentations,
+the window fixtures. Then she went down to the garden-door, but was
+unable to open it, and returned to her room to wait until Adele should
+be stirring. As soon as the woman went to the kitchen Pierrette flew
+to the garden and took possession of it, ran to the river, was amazed
+at the kiosk, and sat down in it; truly, she had enough to see and to
+wonder at until her cousins were up. At breakfast Sylvie said to
+her:--
+
+"Was it you, little one, who was trotting over my head by daybreak,
+and making that racket on the stairs? You woke me so that I couldn't
+go to sleep again. You must be very good and quiet, and amuse yourself
+without noise. Your cousin doesn't like noise."
+
+"And you must wipe your feet," said Rogron. "You went into the kiosk
+with your dirty shoes, and they've tracked all over the floor. Your
+cousin likes cleanliness. A great girl like you ought to be clean.
+Weren't you clean in Brittany? But I recollect when I went down there
+to buy thread it was pitiable to see the folks,--they were like
+savages. At any rate she has a good appetite," added Rogron, looking
+at his sister; "one would think she hadn't eaten anything for days."
+
+Thus, from the very start Pierrette was hurt by the remarks of her two
+cousins,--hurt, she knew not why. Her straightforward, open nature,
+hitherto left to itself, was not given to reflection. Incapable of
+thinking that her cousins were hard, she was fated to find it out
+slowly through suffering. After breakfast the brother and sister,
+pleased with Pierrette's astonishment at the house and anxious to
+enjoy it, took her to the salon to show her its splendors and teach
+her not to touch them. Many celibates, driven by loneliness and the
+moral necessity of caring for something, substitute factitious
+affections for natural ones; they love dogs, cats, canaries, servants,
+or their confessor. Rogron and Sylvie had come to the pass of loving
+immoderately their house and furniture, which had cost them so dear.
+Sylvie began by helping Adele in the mornings to dust and arrange the
+furniture, under pretence that she did not know how to keep it looking
+as good as new. This dusting was soon a desired occupation to her, and
+the furniture, instead of losing its value in her eyes, became ever
+more precious. To use things without hurting them or soiling them or
+scratching the woodwork or clouding the varnish, that was the problem
+which soon became the mania of the old maid's life. Sylvie had a
+closet full of bits of wool, wax, varnish, and brushes, which she had
+learned to use with the dexterity of a cabinet-maker; she had her
+feather dusters and her dusting-cloths; and she rubbed away without
+fear of hurting herself,--she was so strong. The glance of her cold
+blue eyes, hard as steel, was forever roving over the furniture and
+under it, and you could as soon have found a tender spot in her heart
+as a bit of fluff under the sofa.
+
+After the remarks made at Madame Tiphaine's, Sylvie dared not flinch
+from the three hundred francs for Pierrette's clothes. During the
+first week her time was wholly taken up, and Pierrette's too, by
+frocks to order and try on, chemises and petticoats to cut out and
+have made by a seamstress who went out by the day. Pierrette did not
+know how to sew.
+
+"That's pretty bringing up!" said Rogron. "Don't you know how to do
+anything, little girl?"
+
+Pierrette, who knew nothing but how to love, made a pretty, childish
+gesture.
+
+"What did you do in Brittany?" asked Rogron.
+
+"I played," she answered, naively. "Everybody played with me.
+Grandmamma and grandpapa they told me stories. Ah! they all loved me!"
+
+"Hey!" said Rogron; "didn't you take it easy!"
+
+Pierrette opened her eyes wide, not comprehending.
+
+"She is as stupid as an owl," said Sylvie to Mademoiselle Borain, the
+best seamstress in Provins.
+
+"She's so young," said the workwoman, looking kindly at Pierrette,
+whose delicate little muzzle was turned up to her with a coaxing look.
+
+Pierrette preferred the sewing-women to her relations. She was
+endearing in her ways with them, she watched their work, and made them
+those pretty speeches that seem like the flowers of childhood, and
+which her cousin had already silenced, for that gaunt woman loved to
+impress those under her with salutary awe. The sewing-women were
+delighted with Pierrette. Their work, however, was not carried on
+without many and loud grumblings.
+
+"That child will make us pay through the nose!" cried Sylvie to her
+brother.
+
+"Stand still, my dear, and don't plague us; it is all for you and not
+for me," she would say to Pierrette when the child was being measured.
+Sometimes it was, when Pierrette would ask the seamstress some
+question, "Let Mademoiselle Borain do her work, and don't talk to her;
+it is not you who are paying for her time."
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Mademoiselle Borain, "am I to back-stitch this?"
+
+"Yes, do it firmly; I don't want to be making such an outfit as this
+every day."
+
+Sylvie put the same spirit of emulation into Pierrette's outfit that
+she had formerly put into the house. She was determined that her
+cousin should be as well dressed as Madame Garceland's little girl.
+She bought the child fashionable boots of bronzed kid like those the
+little Tiphaines wore, very fine cotton stockings, a corset by the
+best maker, a dress of blue reps, a pretty cape lined with white silk,
+--all this that she, Sylvie, might hold her own against the children
+of the women who had rejected her. The underclothes were quite in
+keeping with the visible articles of dress, for Sylvie feared the
+examining eyes of the various mothers. Pierrette's chemises were of
+fine Madapolam calico. Mademoiselle Borain had mentioned that the sub-
+prefect's little girls wore cambric drawers, embroidered and trimmed
+in the latest style. Pierrette had the same. Sylvie ordered for her a
+charming little drawn bonnet of blue velvet lined with white satin,
+precisely like the one worn by Dr. Martener's little daughter.
+
+Thus attired, Pierrette was the most enchanting little girl in all
+Provins. On Sunday, after church, all the ladies kissed her; Mesdames
+Tiphaine, Garceland, Galardon, Julliard, and the rest fell in love
+with the sweet little Breton girl. This enthusiasm was deeply
+flattering to old Sylvie's self-love; she regarded it as less due to
+Pierrette than to her own benevolence. She ended, however, in being
+affronted by her cousin's success. Pierrette was constantly invited
+out, and Sylvie allowed her to go, always for the purpose of
+triumphing over "those ladies." Pierrette was much in demand for games
+or little parties and dinners with their own little girls. She had
+succeeded where the Rogrons had failed; and Mademoiselle Sylvie soon
+grew indignant that Pierrette was asked to other children's houses
+when those children never came to hers. The artless little thing did
+not conceal the pleasure she found in her visits to these ladies,
+whose affectionate manners contrasted strangely with the harshness of
+her two cousins. A mother would have rejoiced in the happiness of her
+little one, but the Rogrons had taken Pierrette for their own sakes,
+not for hers; their feelings, far from being parental, were dyed in
+selfishness and a sort of commercial calculation.
+
+The handsome outfit, the fine Sunday dresses, and the every-day frocks
+were the beginning of Pierrette's troubles. Like all children free to
+amuse themselves, who are accustomed to follow the dictates of their
+own lively fancies, she was very hard on her clothes, her shoes, and
+above all on those embroidered drawers. A mother when she reproves her
+child thinks only of the child; her voice is gentle; she does not
+raise it unless driven to extremities, or when the child is much in
+fault. But here, in this great matter of Pierrette's clothes, the
+cousins' money was the first consideration; their interests were to be
+thought of, not the child's. Children have the perceptions of the
+canine race for the sentiments of those who rule them; they know
+instinctively whether they are loved or only tolerated. Pure and
+innocent hearts are more distressed by shades of difference than by
+contrasts; a child does not understand evil, but it knows when the
+instinct of the good and the beautiful which nature has implanted in
+it is shocked. The lectures which Pierrette now drew upon herself on
+propriety of behavior, modesty, and economy were merely the corollary
+of the one theme, "Pierrette will ruin us."
+
+These perpetual fault-findings, which were destined to have a fatal
+result for the poor child, brought the two celibates back to the old
+beaten track of their shop-keeping habits, from which their removal to
+Provins had parted them, and in which their natures were now to expand
+and flourish. Accustomed in the old days to rule and to make
+inquisitions, to order about and reprove their clerks sharply, Rogron
+and his sister had actually suffered for want of victims. Little minds
+need to practise despotism to relieve their nerves, just as great
+souls thirst for equality in friendship to exercise their hearts.
+Narrow natures expand by persecuting as much as others through
+beneficence; they prove their power over their fellows by cruel
+tyranny as others do by loving kindness; they simply go the way their
+temperaments drive them. Add to this the propulsion of self-interest
+and you may read the enigma of most social matters.
+
+Thenceforth Pierrette became a necessity to the lives of her cousins.
+From the day of her coming their minds were occupied,--first, with her
+outfit, and then with the novelty of a third presence. But every new
+thing, a sentiment and even a tyranny, is moulded as time goes on into
+fresh shapes. Sylvie began by calling Pierrette "my dear," or "little
+one." Then she abandoned the gentler terms for "Pierrette" only. Her
+reprimands, at first only cross, became sharp and angry; and no sooner
+were their feet on the path of fault-finding than the brother and
+sister made rapid strides. They were no longer bored to death! It was
+not their deliberate intention to be wicked and cruel; it was simply
+the blind instinct of an imbecile tyranny. The pair believed they were
+doing Pierrette a service, just as they had thought their harshness a
+benefit to their apprentices.
+
+Pierrette, whose true and noble and extreme sensibility was the
+antipodes of the Rogrons' hardness, had a dread of being scolded; it
+wounded her so sharply that the tears would instantly start in her
+beautiful, pure eyes. She had a great struggle with herself before she
+could repress the enchanting sprightliness which made her so great a
+favorite elsewhere. After a time she displayed it only in the homes of
+her little friends. By the end of the first month she had learned to
+be passive in her cousins' house,--so much so that Rogron one day
+asked her if she was ill. At that sudden question, she ran to the end
+of the garden, and stood crying beside the river, into which her tears
+may have fallen as she herself was about to fall into the social
+torrent.
+
+One day, in spite of all her care, she tore her best reps frock at
+Madame Tiphaine's, where she was spending a happy day. The poor child
+burst into tears, foreseeing the cruel things which would be said to
+her at home. Questioned by her friends, she let fall a few words about
+her terrible cousin. Madame Tiphaine happened to have some reps
+exactly like that of the frock, and she put in a new breadth herself.
+Mademoiselle Rogron found out the trick, as she expressed it, which
+the little devil had played her. From that day forth she refused to
+let Pierrette go to any of "those women's" houses.
+
+The life the poor girl led in Provins was divided into three distinct
+phases. The first, already shown, in which she had some joy mingled
+with the cold kindness of her cousins and their sharp reproaches,
+lasted three months. Sylvie's refusal to let her go to her little
+friends, backed by the necessity of beginning her education, ended the
+first phase of her life at Provins, the only period when that life was
+bearable to her.
+
+These events, produced at the Rogrons by Pierrette's presence, were
+studied by Vinet and the colonel with the caution of foxes preparing
+to enter a poultry-yard and disturbed by seeing a strange fowl. They
+both called from time to time,--but seldom, so as not to alarm the old
+maid; they talked with Rogron under various pretexts, and made
+themselves masters of his mind with an affectation of reserve and
+modesty which the great Tartuffe himself would have respected. The
+colonel and the lawyer were spending the evening with Rogron on the
+very day when Sylvie had refused in bitter language to let Pierrette
+go again to Madame Tiphaine's, or elsewhere. Being told of this
+refusal the colonel and the lawyer looked at each other with an air
+which seemed to say that they at least knew Provins well.
+
+"Madame Tiphaine intended to insult you," said the lawyer. "We have
+long been warning Rogron of what would happen. There's no good to be
+got from those people."
+
+"What can you expect from the anti-national party!" cried the colonel,
+twirling his moustache and interrupting the lawyer. "But,
+mademoiselle, if we had tried to warn you from those people you might
+have supposed we had some malicious motive in what we said. If you
+like a game of cards in the evening, why don't you have it at home;
+why not play your boston here, in your own house? Is it impossible to
+fill the places of those idiots, the Julliards and all the rest of
+them? Vinet and I know how to play boston, and we can easily find a
+fourth. Vinet might present his wife to you; she is charming, and,
+what is more, a Chargeboeuf. You will not be so exacting as those apes
+of the Upper town; /you/ won't require a good little housewife, who is
+compelled by the meanness of her family to do her own work, to dress
+like a duchess. Poor woman, she has the courage of a lion and the
+meekness of a lamb."
+
+Sylvie Rogron showed her long yellow teeth as she smiled on the
+colonel, who bore the sight heroically and assumed a flattered air.
+
+"If we are only four we can't play boston every night," said Sylvie.
+
+"Why not? What do you suppose an old soldier of the Empire like me
+does with himself? And as for Vinet, his evenings are always free.
+Besides, you'll have plenty of other visitors; I warrant you that," he
+added, with a rather mysterious air.
+
+"What you ought to do," said Vinet, "is to take an open stand against
+the ministerialists of Provins and form an opposition to them. You
+would soon see how popular that would make you; you would have a
+society about you at once. The Tiphaines would be furious at an
+opposition salon. Well, well, why not laugh at others, if others laugh
+at you?--and they do; the clique doesn't mince matters in talking
+about you."
+
+"How's that?" demanded Sylvie.
+
+In the provinces there is always a valve or a faucet through which
+gossip leaks from one social set to another. Vinet knew all the slurs
+cast upon the Rogrons in the salons from which they were now excluded.
+The deputy-judge and archaeologist Desfondrilles belonged to neither
+party. With other independents like him, he repeated what he heard on
+both sides and Vinet made the most of it. The lawyer's spiteful tongue
+put venom into Madame Tiphaine's speeches, and by showing Rogron and
+Sylvie the ridicule they had brought upon themselves he roused an
+undying spirit of hatred in those bitter natures, which needed an
+object for their petty passions.
+
+A few days later Vinet brought his wife, a well-bred woman, neither
+pretty nor plain, timid, very gentle, and deeply conscious of her
+false position. Madame Vinet was fair-complexioned, faded by the cares
+of her poor household, and very simply dressed. No woman could have
+pleased Sylvie more. Madame Vinet endured her airs, and bent before
+them like one accustomed to subjection. On the poor woman's rounded
+brow and delicately timid cheek and in her slow and gentle glance,
+were the traces of deep reflection, of those perceptive thoughts which
+women who are accustomed to suffer bury in total silence.
+
+The influence of the colonel (who now displayed to Sylvie the graces
+of a courtier, in marked contradiction to his usual military
+brusqueness), together with that of the astute Vinet, was soon to harm
+the Breton child. Shut up in the house, no longer allowed to go out
+except in company with her old cousin, Pierrette, that pretty little
+squirrel, was at the mercy of the incessant cry, "Don't touch that,
+child, let that alone!" She was perpetually being lectured on her
+carriage and behavior; if she stooped or rounded her shoulders her
+cousin would call to her to be as erect as herself (Sylvie was rigid
+as a soldier presenting arms to his colonel); sometimes indeed the
+ill-natured old maid enforced the order by slaps on the back to make
+the girl straighten up.
+
+Thus the free and joyous little child of the Marais learned by degrees
+to repress all liveliness and to make herself, as best she could, an
+automaton.
+
+
+
+V
+
+HISTORY OF POOR COUSINS IN THE HOME OF RICH ONES
+
+One evening, which marked the beginning of Pierrette's second phase of
+life in her cousin's house, the child, whom the three guests had not
+seen during the evening, came into the room to kiss her relatives and
+say good-night to the company. Sylvie turned her cheek coldly to the
+pretty creature, as if to avoid kissing her. The motion was so cruelly
+significant that the tears sprang to Pierrette's eyes.
+
+"Did you prick yourself, little girl?" said the atrocious Vinet.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked Sylvie, severely.
+
+"Nothing," said the poor child, going up to Rogron.
+
+"Nothing?" said Sylvie, "that's nonsense; nobody cries for nothing."
+
+"What is it, my little darling?" said Madame Vinet.
+
+"My rich cousin isn't as kind to me as my poor grandmother was,"
+sobbed Pierrette.
+
+"Your grandmother took your money," said Sylvie, "and your cousin will
+leave you hers."
+
+The colonel and the lawyer glanced at each other.
+
+"I would rather be robbed and loved," said Pierrette.
+
+"Then you shall be sent back whence you came."
+
+"But what has the dear little thing done?" asked Madame Vinet.
+
+Vinet gave his wife the terrible, fixed, cold look with which men
+enforce their absolute dominion. The hapless helot, punished
+incessantly for not having the one thing that was wanted of her, a
+fortune, took up her cards.
+
+"What has she done?" said Sylvie, throwing up her head with such
+violence that the yellow wall-flowers in her cap nodded. "She is
+always looking about to annoy us. She opened my watch to see the
+inside, and meddled with the wheel and broke the mainspring.
+Mademoiselle pays no heed to what is said to her. I am all day long
+telling her to take care of things, and I might just as well talk to
+that lamp."
+
+Pierrette, ashamed at being reproved before strangers, crept softly
+out of the room.
+
+"I am thinking all the time how to subdue that child," said Rogron.
+
+"Isn't she old enough to go to school?" asked Madame Vinet.
+
+Again she was silenced by a look from her husband, who had been
+careful to tell her nothing of his own or the colonel's schemes.
+
+"This is what comes of taking charge of other people's children!"
+cried the colonel. "You may still have some of your own, you or your
+brother. Why don't you both marry?"
+
+Sylvie smiled agreeably on the colonel. For the first time in her life
+she met a man to whom the idea that she could marry did not seem
+absurd.
+
+"Madame Vinet is right," cried Rogron; "perhaps teaching would keep
+Pierrette quiet. A master wouldn't cost much."
+
+The colonel's remark so preoccupied Sylvie that she made no answer to
+her brother.
+
+"If you are willing to be security for that opposition journal I was
+talking to you about," said Vinet, "you will find an excellent master
+for the little cousin in the managing editor; we intend to engage that
+poor schoolmaster who lost his employment through the encroachments of
+the clergy. My wife is right; Pierrette is a rough diamond that wants
+polishing."
+
+"I thought you were a baron," said Sylvie to the colonel, while the
+cards were being dealt, and after a long pause in which they had all
+been rather thoughtful.
+
+"Yes; but when I was made baron, in 1814, after the battle of Nangis,
+where my regiment performed miracles, I had money and influence enough
+to secure the rank. But now my barony is like the grade of general
+which I held in 1815,--it needs a revolution to give it back to me."
+
+"If you will secure my endorsement by a mortgage," said Rogron,
+answering Vinet after long consideration, "I will give it."
+
+"That can easily be arranged," said Vinet. "The new paper will soon
+restore the colonel's rights, and make your salon more powerful in
+Provins than those of Tiphaine and company."
+
+"How so?" asked Sylvie.
+
+While his wife was dealing and Vinet himself explaining the importance
+they would all gain by the publication of an independent newspaper,
+Pierrette was dissolved in tears; her heart and her mind were one in
+this matter; she felt and knew that her cousin was more to blame than
+she was. The little country girl instinctively understood that charity
+and benevolence ought to be a complete offering. She hated her
+handsome frocks and all the things that were made for her; she was
+forced to pay too dearly for such benefits. She wept with vexation at
+having given cause for complaint against her, and resolved to behave
+in future in such a way as to compel her cousins to find no further
+fault with her. The thought then came into her mind how grand Brigaut
+had been in giving her all his savings without a word. Poor child! she
+fancied her troubles were now at their worst; she little knew that
+other misfortunes were even now being planned for her in the salon.
+
+A few days later Pierrette had a writing-master. She was taught to
+read, write, and cipher. Enormous injury was thus supposed to be done
+to the Rogrons' house. Ink-spots were found on the tables, on the
+furniture, on Pierrette's clothes; copy-books and pens were left
+about; sand was scattered everywhere, books were torn and dog's-eared
+as the result of these lessons. She was told in harsh terms that she
+would have to earn her own living, and not be a burden to others. As
+she listened to these cruel remarks Pierrette's throat contracted
+violently with acute pain, her heart throbbed. She was forced to
+restrain her tears, or she was scolded for weeping and told it was an
+insult to the kindness of her magnanimous cousins. Rogron had found
+the life that suited him. He scolded Pierrette as he used to scold his
+clerks; he would call her when at play, and compel her to study; he
+made her repeat her lessons, and became himself the almost savage
+master of the poor child. Sylvie, on her side, considered it a duty to
+teach Pierrette the little that she knew herself about women's work.
+Neither Rogron nor his sister had the slightest softness in their
+natures. Their narrow minds, which found real pleasure in worrying the
+poor child, passed insensibly from outward kindness to extreme
+severity. This severity was necessitated, they believed, by what they
+called the self-will of the child, which had not been broken when
+young and was very obstinate. Her masters were ignorant how to give to
+their instructions a form suited to the intelligence of the pupil,--a
+thing, by the bye, which marks the difference between public and
+private education. The fault was far less with Pierrette than with her
+cousins. It took her an infinite length of time to learn the
+rudiments. She was called stupid and dull, clumsy and awkward for mere
+nothings. Incessantly abused in words, the child suffered still more
+from the harsh looks of her cousins. She acquired the doltish ways of
+a sheep; she dared not do anything of her own impulse, for all she did
+was misinterpreted, misjudged, and ill-received. In all things she
+awaited silently the good pleasure and the orders of her cousins,
+keeping her thoughts within her own mind and sheltering herself behind
+a passive obedience. Her brilliant colors began to fade. Sometimes she
+complained of feeling ill. When her cousin asked, "Where?" the poor
+little thing, who had pains all over her, answered, "Everywhere."
+
+"Nonsense! who ever heard of any one suffering everywhere?" cried
+Sylvie. "If you suffered everywhere you'd be dead."
+
+"People suffer in their chests," said Rogron, who liked to hear
+himself harangue, "or they have toothache, headache, pains in their
+feet or stomach, but no one has pains everywhere. What do you mean by
+everywhere? I can tell you; 'everywhere' means /nowhere/. Don't you
+know what you are doing?--you are complaining for complaining's sake."
+
+Pierrette ended by total silence, seeing how all her girlish remarks,
+the flowers of her dawning intelligence, were replied to with ignorant
+commonplaces which her natural good sense told her were ridiculous.
+
+"You complain," said Rogron, "but you've got the appetite of a monk."
+
+The only person who did not bruise the delicate little flower was the
+fat servant woman, Adele. Adele would go up and warm her bed,--doing
+it on the sly after a certain evening when Sylvie had scolded her for
+giving that comfort to the child.
+
+"Children should be hardened, to give them strong constitutions. Am I
+and my brother the worse for it?" said Sylvie. "You'll make Pierrette
+a /peakling/"; this was a word in the Rogron vocabulary which meant a
+puny and suffering little being.
+
+The naturally endearing ways of the angelic child were treated as
+dissimulation. The fresh, pure blossoms of affection which bloomed
+instinctively in that young soul were pitilessly crushed. Pierrette
+suffered many a cruel blow on the tender flesh of her heart. If she
+tried to soften those ferocious natures by innocent, coaxing wiles
+they accused her of doing it with an object. "Tell me at once what you
+want?" Rogron would say, brutally; "you are not coaxing me for
+nothing."
+
+Neither brother nor sister believed in affection, and Pierrette's
+whole being was affection. Colonel Gouraud, anxious to please
+Mademoiselle Rogron, approved of all she did about Pierrette. Vinet
+also encouraged them in what they said against her. He attributed all
+her so-called misdeeds to the obstinacy of the Breton character, and
+declared that no power, no will, could ever conquer it. Rogron and his
+sister were so shrewdly flattered by the two manoeuvrers that the
+former agreed to go security for the "Courrier de Provins," and the
+latter invested five thousand francs in the enterprise.
+
+On this, the colonel and lawyer took the field. They got a hundred
+shares, of five hundred francs each, taken among the farmers and
+others called independents, and also among those who had bought lands
+of the national domains,--whose fears they worked upon. They even
+extended their operations throughout the department and along its
+borders. Each shareholder of course subscribed to the paper. The
+judicial advertisements were divided between the "Bee-hive" and the
+"Courrier." The first issue of the latter contained a pompous eulogy
+on Rogron. He was presented to the community as the Laffitte of
+Provins. The public mind having thus received an impetus in this new
+direction, it was manifest, of course, that the coming elections would
+be contested. Madame Tiphaine, whose highest hope was to take her
+husband to Paris as deputy, was in despair. After reading an article
+in the new paper aimed at her and at Julliard junior, she remarked:
+"Unfortunately for me, I forgot that there is always a scoundrel close
+to a dupe, and that fools are magnets to clever men of the fox breed."
+
+As soon as the "Courrier" was fairly launched on a radius of fifty
+miles, Vinet bought a new coat and decent boots, waistcoats, and
+trousers. He set up the gray slouch hat sacred to liberals, and showed
+his linen. His wife took a servant, and appeared in public dressed as
+the wife of a prominent man should be; her caps were pretty. Vinet
+proved grateful--out of policy. He and his friend Cournant, the
+liberal notary and the rival of the ministerial notary Auffray, became
+the close advisers of the Rogrons, to whom they were able to do a
+couple of signal services. The leases granted by old Rogron to their
+father in 1815, when matters were at a low ebb, were about to expire.
+Horticulture and vegetable gardening had developed enormously in the
+neighborhood of Provins. The lawyer and notary set to work to enable
+the Rogrons to increase their rentals. Vinet won two lawsuits against
+two districts on a question of planting trees, which involved five
+hundred poplars. The proceeds of the poplars, added to the savings of
+the brother and sister, who for the last three years had laid by six
+thousand a year at high interest, was wisely invested in the purchase
+of improved lands. Vinet also undertook and carried out the ejectment
+of certain peasants to whom the elder Rogron had lent money on their
+farms, and who had strained every nerve to pay off the debt, but in
+vain. The cost of the Rogrons' fine house was thus in a measure
+recouped. Their landed property, lying around Provins and chosen by
+their father with the sagacious eye of an innkeeper, was divided into
+small holdings, the largest of which did not exceed five acres, and
+rented to safe tenants, men who owned other parcels of land, that were
+ample security for their leases. These investments brought in, by
+1826, five thousand francs a year. Taxes were charged to the tenants,
+and there were no buildings needing insurance or repairs.
+
+By the end of the second period of Pierrette's stay in Provins life
+had become so hard for her, the cold indifference of all who came to
+the house, the silly fault-finding, and the total absence of affection
+on the part of her cousins grew so bitter, she was conscious of a
+chill dampness like that of a grave creeping round her, that the bold
+idea of escaping, on foot and without money, to Brittany and to her
+grandparents took possession of her mind. Two events hindered her from
+attempting it. Old Lorrain died, and Rogron was appointed guardian of
+his little cousin. If the grandmother had died first, we may believe
+that Rogron, advised by Vinet, would have claimed Pierrette's eight
+thousand francs and reduced the old man to penury.
+
+"You may, perhaps, inherit from Pierrette," said Vinet, with a horrid
+smile. "Who knows who may live and who may die?"
+
+Enlightened by that remark, Rogron gave old Madame Lorrain no peace
+until she had secured to Pierrette the reversion of the eight thousand
+francs at her death.
+
+Pierrette was deeply shocked by these events. She was on the point of
+making her first communion,--another reason for resigning the hope of
+escape from Provins. This ceremony, simple and customary as it was,
+led to great changes in the Rogron household. Sylvie learned that
+Monsieur le cure Peroux was instructing the little Julliards,
+Lesourds, Garcelands, and the rest. She therefore made it a point of
+honor that Pierrette should be instructed by the vicar himself,
+Monsieur Habert, a priest who was thought to belong to the
+/Congregation/, very zealous for the interests of the Church, and much
+feared in Provins,--a man who hid a vast ambition beneath the
+austerity of stern principles. The sister of this priest, an unmarried
+woman about thirty years of age, kept a school for young ladies.
+Brother and sister looked alike; both were thin, yellow, black-haired,
+and bilious.
+
+Like a true Breton girl, cradled in the practices and poetry of
+Catholicism, Pierrette opened her heart and ears to the words of this
+imposing priest. Sufferings predispose the mind to devotion, and
+nearly all young girls, impelled by instinctive tenderness, are
+inclined to mysticism, the deepest aspect of religion. The priest
+found good soil in which to sow the seed of the Gospel and the dogmas
+of the Church. He completely changed the current of the girl's
+thoughts. Pierrette loved Jesus Christ in the light in which he is
+presented to young girls at the time of their first communion, as a
+celestial bridegroom; her physical and moral sufferings gained a
+meaning for her; she saw the finger of God in all things. Her soul, so
+cruelly hurt although she could not accuse her cousins of actual
+wrong, took refuge in that sphere to which all sufferers fly on the
+wings of the cardinal virtues,--Faith, Hope, Charity. She abandoned
+her thoughts of escape. Sylvie, surprised by the transformation
+Monsieur Habert had effected in Pierrette, was curious to know how it
+had been done. And it thus came about that the austere priest, while
+preparing Pierrette for her first communion, also won to God the
+hitherto erring soul of Mademoiselle Sylvie. Sylvie became pious.
+Jerome Rogron, on whom the so-called Jesuit could get no grip (for
+just then the influence of His Majesty the late /Constitutionnel/ the
+First was more powerful over weaklings than the influence of the
+Church), Jerome Rogron remained faithful to Colonel Gouraud, Vinet,
+and Liberalism.
+
+Mademoiselle Rogron naturally made the acquaintance of Mademoiselle
+Habert, with whom she sympathized deeply. The two spinsters loved each
+other as sisters. Mademoiselle Habert offered to take Pierrette into
+her school to spare Sylvie the annoyance of her education; but the
+brother and sister both declared that Pierrette's absence would make
+the house too lonely; their attachment to their little cousin seemed
+excessive.
+
+When Gouraud and Vinet became aware of the advent of Mademoiselle
+Habert on the scene they concluded that the ambitious priest her
+brother had the same matrimonial plan for his sister that the colonel
+was forming for himself and Sylvie.
+
+"Your sister wants to get you married," said Vinet to Rogron.
+
+"With whom?" asked Rogron.
+
+"With that old sorceress of a schoolmistress," cried the colonel,
+twirling his moustache.
+
+"She hasn't said anything to me about it," said Rogron, naively.
+
+So thorough an old maid as Sylvie was certain to make good progress in
+the way of salvation. The influence of the priest would as certainly
+increase, and in the end affect Rogron, over whom Sylvie had great
+power. The two Liberals, who were naturally alarmed, saw plainly that
+if the priest were resolved to marry his sister to Rogron (a far more
+suitable marriage than that of Sylvie to the colonel) he could then
+drive Sylvie in extreme devotion to the Church, and put Pierrette in a
+convent. They might therefore lose eighteen months' labor in flattery
+and meannesses of all sorts. Their minds were suddenly filled with a
+bitter, silent hatred to the priest and his sister, though they felt
+the necessity of living on good terms with them in order to track
+their manoeuvres. Monsieur and Mademoiselle Habert, who could play
+both whist and boston, now came every evening to the Rogrons. The
+assiduity of the one pair induced the assiduity of the other. The
+colonel and lawyer felt that they were pitted against adversaries who
+were fully as strong as they,--a presentiment that was shared by the
+priest and his sister. The situation soon became that of a battle-
+field. Precisely as the colonel was enabling Sylvie to taste the
+unhoped-for joys of being sought in marriage, so Mademoiselle Habert
+was enveloping the timid Rogron in the cotton-wool of her attentions,
+words, and glances. Neither side could utter that grand word of
+statesmanship, "Let us divide!" for each wanted the whole prey.
+
+The two clever foxes of the Opposition made the mistake of pulling the
+first trigger. Vinet, under the spur of self-interest, bethought
+himself of his wife's only friends, and looked up Mademoiselle de
+Chargeboeuf and her mother. The two women were living in poverty at
+Troyes on two thousand francs a year. Mademoiselle Bathilde de
+Chargeboeuf was one of those fine creatures who believe in marriage
+for love up to their twenty-fifth year, and change their opinion when
+they find themselves still unmarried. Vinet managed to persuade Madame
+de Chargeboeuf to join her means to his and live with his family in
+Provins, where Bathilde, he assured her, could marry a fool named
+Rogron, and, clever as she was, take her place in the best society of
+the place.
+
+The arrival of Madame and Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf in the lawyer's
+household was a great reinforcement for the liberal party; and it
+created consternation among the aristocrats of Provins and also in the
+Tiphaine clique. Madame de Breautey, horrified to see two women of
+rank so misled, begged them to come to her. She was shocked that the
+royalists of Troyes had so neglected the mother and daughter, whose
+situation she now learned for the first time.
+
+"How is it that no old country gentleman has married that dear girl,
+who is cut out for a lady of the manor?" she said. "They have let her
+run to seed, and now she is to be flung at the head of a Rogron!"
+
+She ransacked the whole department but did not succeed in finding any
+gentleman willing to marry a girl whose mother had only two thousand
+francs a year. The "clique" and the subprefect also looked about them
+with the same object, but they were all too late. Madame de Breautey
+made terrible charges against the selfishness which degraded France,--
+the consequence, she said, of materialism, and of the importance now
+given by the laws to money: nobility was no longer of value! nor
+beauty either! Such creatures as the Rogrons, the Vinets, could stand
+up and fight with the King of France!
+
+Bathilde de Chargeboeuf had not only the incontestable superiority of
+beauty over her rival, but that of dress as well. She was dazzlingly
+fair. At twenty-five her shoulders were fully developed, and the
+curves of her beautiful figure were exquisite. The roundness of her
+throat, the purity of its lines, the wealth of her golden hair, the
+charming grace of her smile, the distinguished carriage of her head,
+the character of her features, the fine eyes finely placed beneath a
+well-formed brow, her every motion, noble and high-bred, and her light
+and graceful figure,--all were in harmony. Her hands were beautiful,
+and her feet slender. Health gave her, perhaps, too much the look of a
+handsome barmaid. "But that can't be a defect in the eyes of a
+Rogron," sighed Madame Tiphaine. Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf's dress
+when she made her first appearance in Provins at the Rogrons' house
+was very simple. Her brown merino gown edged with green embroidery was
+worn low-necked; but a tulle fichu, carefully drawn down by hidden
+strings, covered her neck and shoulders, though it opened a little in
+front, where its folds were caught together with a /sevigne/. Beneath
+this delicate fabric Bathilde's beauties seemed all the more enticing
+and coquettish. She took off her velvet bonnet and her shawl on
+arriving, and showed her pretty ears adorned with what were then
+called "ear-drops" in gold. She wore a little /jeannette/--a black
+velvet ribbon with a heart attached--round her throat, where it shone
+like the jet ring which fantastic nature had fastened round the tail
+of a white angora cat. She knew all the little tricks of a girl who
+seeks to marry; her fingers arranged her curls which were not in the
+least out of order; she entreated Rogron to fasten a cuff-button, thus
+showing him her wrist, a request which that dazzled fool rudely
+refused, hiding his emotions under the mask of indifference. The
+timidity of the only love he was ever to feel in the whole course of
+his life took an external appearance of dislike. Sylvie and her friend
+Celeste Habert were deceived by it; not so Vinet, the wise head of
+this doltish circle, among whom no one really coped with him but the
+priest,--the colonel being for a long time his ally.
+
+On the other hand the colonel was behaving to Sylvie very much as
+Bathilde behaved to Rogron. He put on a clean shirt every evening and
+wore velvet stocks, which set off his martial features and the
+spotless white of his collar. He adopted the fashion of white pique
+waistcoats, and caused to be made for him a new surtout of blue cloth,
+on which his red rosette glowed finely; all this under pretext of
+doing honor to the new guests Madame and Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf.
+He even refrained from smoking for two hours previous to his
+appearance in the Rogrons' salon. His grizzled hair was brushed in a
+waving line across a cranium which was ochre in tone. He assumed the
+air and manner of a party leader, of a man who was preparing to drive
+out the enemies of France, the Bourbons, on short, to beat of drum.
+
+The satanic lawyer and the wily colonel played the priest and his
+sister a more cruel trick than even the importation of the beautiful
+Madame de Chargeboeuf, who was considered by all the Liberal party and
+by Madame de Breautey and her aristocratic circle to be far handsomer
+than Madame Tiphaine. These two great statesmen of the little
+provincial town made everybody believe that the priest was in sympathy
+with their ideas; so that before long Provins began to talk of him as
+a liberal ecclesiastic. As soon as this news reached the bishop
+Monsieur Habert was sent for and admonished to cease his visits to the
+Rogrons; but his sister continued to go there. Thus the salon Rogron
+became a fixed fact and a constituted power.
+
+Before the year was out political intrigues were not less lively than
+the matrimonial schemes of the Rogron salon. While the selfish
+interests hidden in these hearts were struggling in deadly combat the
+events which resulted from them had a fatal celebrity. Everybody knows
+that the Villele ministry was overthrown by the elections of 1826.
+Vinet, the Liberal candidate at Provins, who had borrowed money of his
+notary to buy a domain which made him eligible for election, came very
+near defeating Monsieur Tiphaine, who saved his election by only two
+votes. The headquarters of the Liberals was the Rogron salon; among
+the /habitues/ were the notary Cournant and his wife, and Doctor
+Neraud, whose youth was said to have been stormy, but who now took a
+serious view of life; he gave himself up to study and was, according
+to all Liberals, a far more capable man than Monsieur Martener, the
+aristocratic physician. As for the Rogrons, they no more understood
+their present triumph than they had formerly understood their
+ostracism.
+
+The beautiful Bathilde, to whom Vinet had explained Pierrette as an
+enemy, was extremely disdainful to the girl. It seemed as though
+everybody's selfish schemes demanded the humiliation of that poor
+victim. Madame Vinet could do nothing for her, ground as she herself
+was beneath those implacable self-interests which the lawyer's wife
+had come at last to see and comprehend. Her husband's imperious will
+had alone taken her to the Rogron's house, where she had suffered much
+at the harsh treatment of the pretty little creature, who would often
+press up against her as if divining her secret thoughts, sometimes
+asking the poor lady to show her a stitch in knitting or to teach her
+a bit of embroidery. The child proved in return that if she were
+treated gently she would understand what was taught her, and succeed
+in what she tried to do quite marvellously. But Madame Vinet was soon
+no longer necessary to her husband's plans, and after the arrival of
+Madame and Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf she ceased to visit the
+Rogrons.
+
+Sylvie, who now indulged in the idea of marrying, began to consider
+Pierrette as an obstacle. The girl was nearly fourteen; the pallid
+whiteness of her skin, a symptom of illness entirely overlooked by the
+ignorant old maid, made her exquisitely lovely. Sylvie took it into
+her head to balance the cost which Pierrette had been to them by
+making a servant of her. All the /habitues/ of the house to whom she
+spoke of the matter advised that she should send away Adele. Why
+shouldn't Pierrette take care of the house and cook? If there was too
+much work at any time Mademoiselle Rogron could easily employ the
+colonel's woman-of-all-work, an excellent cook and a most respectable
+person. Pierrette ought to learn how to cook, and rub floors, and
+sweep, said the lawyer; every girl should be taught to keep house
+properly and go to market and know the price of things. The poor
+little soul, whose self-devotion was equal to her generosity, offered
+herself willingly, pleased to think that she could earn the bitter
+bread which she ate in that house. Adele was sent away, and Pierrette
+thus lost the only person who might have protected her.
+
+In spite of the poor child's strength of heart she was henceforth
+crushed down physically as well as mentally. Her cousins had less
+consideration for her than for a servant; she belonged to them! She
+was scolded for mere nothings, for an atom of dust left on a glass
+globe or a marble mantelpiece. The handsome ornaments she had once
+admired now became odious to her. No matter how she strove to do
+right, her inexorable cousins always found something to reprove in
+whatever she did. In the course of two years Pierrette never received
+the slightest praise, or heard a kindly word. Happiness for her lay in
+not being scolded. She bore with angelic patience the morose ill-humor
+of the two celibates, to whom all tender feelings were absolutely
+unknown, and who daily made her feel her dependence on them.
+
+Such a life for a young girl, pressed as it were between the two chops
+of a vise, increased her illness. She began to feel violent internal
+distresses, secret pangs so sudden in their attacks that her strength
+was undermined and her natural development arrested. By slow degrees
+and through dreadful, though hidden sufferings, the poor child came to
+the state in which the companion of her childhood found her when he
+sang to her his Breton ditty at the dawn of the October day.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+AN OLD MAID'S JEALOUSY
+
+Before we relate the domestic drama which the coming of Jacques
+Brigaut was destined to bring about in the Rogron family it is best to
+explain how the lad came to be in Provins; for he is, as it were, a
+somewhat mute personage on the scene.
+
+When he ran from the house Brigaut was not only frightened by
+Pierrette's gesture, he was horrified by the change he saw in his
+little friend. He could scarcely recognize the voice, the eyes, the
+gestures that were once so lively, gay, and withal so tender. When he
+had gained some distance from the house his legs began to tremble
+under him; hot flushes ran down his back. He had seen the shadow of
+Pierrette, but not Pierrette herself! The lad climbed to the Upper
+town till he found a spot from which he could see the square and the
+house where Pierrette lived. He gazed at it mournfully, lost in many
+thoughts, as though he were entering some grief of which he could not
+see the end. Pierrette was ill; she was not happy; she pined for
+Brittany--what was the matter with her? All these questions passed and
+repassed through his heart and rent it, revealing to his own soul the
+extent of his love for his little adopted sister.
+
+It is extremely rare to find a passion existing between two children
+of opposite sexes. The charming story of Paul and Virginia does not,
+any more than this of Pierrette and Brigaut, answer the question put
+by that strange moral fact. Modern history offers only the illustrious
+instance of the Marchesa di Pescara and her husband. Destined to marry
+by their parents from their earliest years, they adored each other and
+were married, and their union gave to the sixteenth century the noble
+spectacle of a perfect conjugal love without a flaw. When the marchesa
+became a widow at the age of thirty-four, beautiful, intellectually
+brilliant, universally adored, she refused to marry sovereigns and
+buried herself in a convent, seeing and knowing thenceforth only nuns.
+Such was the perfect love that suddenly developed itself in the heart
+of the Breton workman. Pierrette and he had often protected each
+other; with what bliss had he given her the money for her journey; he
+had almost killed himself by running after the diligence when she left
+him. Pierrette had known nothing of all that; but for him the
+recollection had warmed and comforted the cold, hard life he had led
+for the last three years. For Pierrette's sake he had struggled to
+improve himself; he had learned his trade for Pierrette; he had come
+to Paris for Pierrette, intending to make his fortune for /her/. After
+spending a fortnight in the city, he had not been able to hold out
+against the desire to see her, and he had walked from Saturday night
+to Monday morning. He intended to return to Paris; but the moving
+sight of his little friend nailed him to Provins. A wonderful
+magnetism (still denied in spite of many proofs) acted upon him
+without his knowledge. Tears rolled from his eyes when they rose in
+hers. If to her he was Brittany and her happy childhood, to him she
+was life itself.
+
+At sixteen years of age Brigaut did not yet know how to draw or to
+model a cornice; he was ignorant of much, but he had earned, by piece-
+work done in the leisure of his apprenticeship, some four or five
+francs a day. On this he could live in Provins and be near Pierrette;
+he would choose the best cabinet-maker in the town, and learn the rest
+of his trade in working for him, and thus keep watch over his darling.
+
+Brigaut's mind was made up as he sat there thinking. He went back to
+Paris and fetched his certificate, tools, and baggage, and three days
+later he was a journeyman in the establishment of Monsieur Frappier,
+the best cabinet-maker in Provins. Active, steady workmen, not given
+to junketing and taverns, are so rare that masters hold to young men
+like Brigaut when they find them. To end Brigaut's history on this
+point, we will say here that by the end of the month he was made
+foreman, and was fed and lodged by Frappier, who taught him arithmetic
+and line drawing. The house and shop were in the Grand'Rue, not a
+hundred feet from the little square where Pierrette lived.
+
+Brigaut buried his love in his heart and committed no imprudence. He
+made Madame Frappier tell him all she knew about the Rogrons. Among
+other things, she related to him the way in which their father had
+laid hands on the property of old Auffray, Pierrette's grandfather.
+Brigaut obtained other information as to the character of the brother
+and sister. He met Pierrette sometimes in the market with her cousin,
+and shuddered to see the heavy basket she was carrying on her arm. On
+Sundays he went to church to look for her, dressed in her best
+clothes. There, for the first time, he became aware that Pierrette was
+Mademoiselle Lorrain. Pierrette saw him and made him a hasty sign to
+keep out of sight. To him, there was a world of things in that little
+gesture, as there had been, a fortnight earlier, in the sign by which
+she told him from her window to run away. Ah! what a fortune he must
+make in the coming ten years in order to marry his little friend, to
+whom, he was told, the Rogrons were to leave their house, a hundred
+acres of land, and twelve thousand francs a year, not counting their
+savings!
+
+The persevering Breton was determined to be thoroughly educated for
+his trade, and he set about acquiring all the knowledge that he
+lacked. As long as only the principles of his work were concerned he
+could learn those in Provins as well as in Paris, and thus remain near
+Pierrette, to whom he now became anxious to explain his projects and
+the sort of protection she could rely on from him. He was determined
+to know the reason of her pallor, and of the debility which was
+beginning to appear in the organ which is always the last to show the
+signs of failing life, namely the eyes; he would know, too, the cause
+of the sufferings which gave her that look as though death were near
+and she might drop at any moment beneath its scythe. The two signs,
+the two gestures--not denying their friendship but imploring caution--
+alarmed the young Breton. Evidently Pierrette wished him to wait and
+not attempt to see her; otherwise there was danger, there was peril
+for her. As she left the church she was able to give him one look, and
+Brigaut saw that her eyes were full of tears. But he could have sooner
+squared the circle than have guessed what had happened in the Rogrons'
+house during the fortnight which had elapsed since his arrival.
+
+It was not without keen apprehension that Pierrette came downstairs on
+the morning after Brigaut had invaded her morning dreams like another
+dream. She was certain that her cousin Sylvie must have heard the
+song, or she would not have risen and opened her window; but Pierrette
+was ignorant of the powerful reasons that made the old maid so alert.
+For the last eight days, strange events and bitter feelings agitated
+the minds of the chief personages who frequented the Rogron salon.
+These hidden matters, carefully concealed by all concerned, were
+destined to fall in their results like an avalanche on Pierrette. Such
+mysterious things, which we ought perhaps to call the putrescence of
+the human heart, lie at the base of the greatest revolutions,
+political, social or domestic; but in telling of them it is desirable
+to explain that their subtle significance cannot be given in a matter-
+of-fact narrative. These secret schemes and calculations do not show
+themselves as brutally and undisguisedly while taking place as they
+must when the history of them is related. To set down in writing the
+circumlocutions, oratorical precautions, protracted conversations, and
+honeyed words glossed over the venom of intentions, would make as long
+a book as that magnificent poem called "Clarissa Harlowe."
+
+Mademoiselle Habert and Mademoiselle Sylvie were equally desirous of
+marrying, but one was ten years older than the other, and the
+probabilities of life allowed Celeste Habert to expect that her
+children would inherit all the Rogron property. Sylvie was forty-two,
+an age at which marriage is beset by perils. In confiding to each
+other their ideas, Celeste, instigated by her vindictive brother the
+priest, enlightened Sylvie as to the dangers she would incur. Sylvie
+trembled; she was terribly afraid of death, an idea which shakes all
+celibates to their centre. But just at this time the Martignac
+ministry came into power,--a Liberal victory which overthrew the
+Villele administration. The Vinet party now carried their heads high
+in Provins. Vinet himself became a personage. The Liberals prophesied
+his advancement; he would certainly be deputy and attorney-general. As
+for the colonel, he would be made mayor of Provins. Ah, to reign as
+Madame Garceland, the wife of the present mayor, now reigned! Sylvie
+could not hold out against that hope; she determined to consult a
+doctor, though the proceeding would only cover her with ridicule. To
+consult Monsieur Neraud, the Liberal physician and the rival of
+Monsieur Martener, would be a blunder. Celeste Habert offered to hide
+Sylvie in her dressing-room while she herself consulted Monsieur
+Martener, the physician of her establishment, on this difficult
+matter. Whether Martener was, or was not, Celeste's accomplice need
+not be discovered; at any rate, he told his client that even at thirty
+the danger, though slight, did exist. "But," he added, "with your
+constitution, you need fear nothing."
+
+"But how about a woman over forty?" asked Mademoiselle Celeste.
+
+"A married woman who has had children has nothing to fear."
+
+"But I mean an unmarried woman, like Mademoiselle Rogron, for
+instance?"
+
+"Oh, that's another thing," said Monsieur Martener. "Successful
+childbirth is then one of those miracles which God sometimes allows
+himself, but rarely."
+
+"Why?" asked Celeste.
+
+The doctor answered with a terrifying pathological description; he
+explained that the elasticity given by nature to youthful muscles and
+bones did not exist at a later age, especially in women whose lives
+were sedentary.
+
+"So you think that an unmarried woman ought not to marry after forty?"
+
+"Not unless she waits some years," replied the doctor. "But then, of
+course, it is not marriage, it is only an association of interests."
+
+The result of the interview, clearly, seriously, scientifically and
+sensibly stated, was that an unmarried woman would make a great
+mistake in marrying after forty. When the doctor had departed
+Mademoiselle Celeste found Sylvie in a frightful state, green and
+yellow, and with the pupils of her eyes dilated.
+
+"Then you really love the colonel?" asked Celeste.
+
+"I still hoped," replied Sylvie.
+
+"Well, then, wait!" cried Mademoiselle Habert, Jesuitically, aware
+that time would rid her of the colonel.
+
+Sylvie's new devotion to the church warned her that the morality of
+such a marriage might be doubtful. She accordingly sounded her
+conscience in the confessional. The stern priest explained the
+opinions of the Church, which sees in marriage only the propagation of
+humanity, and rebukes second marriages and all passions but those with
+a social purpose. Sylvie's perplexities were great. These internal
+struggles gave extraordinary force to her passion, investing it with
+that inexplicable attraction which, from the days of Eve, the thing
+forbidden possesses for women. Mademoiselle Rogron's perturbation did
+not escape the lynx-eyed lawyer.
+
+One evening, after the game had ended, Vinet approached his dear
+friend Sylvie, took her hand, and led her to a sofa.
+
+"Something troubles you," he said.
+
+She nodded sadly. The lawyer let the others depart; Rogron walked home
+with the Chargeboeufs, and when Vinet was alone with the old maid he
+wormed the truth out of her.
+
+"Cleverly played, abbe!" thought he. "But you've played into my
+hands."
+
+The foxy lawyer was more decided in his opinion than even the doctor.
+He advised marriage in ten years. Inwardly he was vowing that the
+whole Rogron fortune should go to Bathilde. He rubbed his hands, his
+pinched lips closed more tightly as he hurried home. The influence
+exercised by Monsieur Habert, physician of the soul, and by Vinet,
+doctor of the purse, balanced each other perfectly. Rogron had no
+piety in him; so the churchman and the man of law, the black-robed
+pair, were fairly matched.
+
+On discovering the victory obtained by Celeste, in her anxiety to
+marry Rogron herself, over Sylvie, torn between the fear of death and
+the joy of being baronness and mayoress, the lawyer saw his chance of
+driving the colonel from the battlefield. He knew Rogron well enough
+to be certain he could marry him to Bathilde; Jerome had already
+succumbed inwardly to her charms, and Vinet knew that the first time
+the pair were alone together the marriage would be settled. Rogron had
+reached the point of keeping his eyes fixed on Celeste, so much did he
+fear to look at Bathilde. Vinet had now possessed himself of Sylvie's
+secrets, and saw the force with which she loved the colonel. He fully
+understood the struggle of such a passion in the heart of an old maid
+who was also in the grasp of religious emotion, and he saw his way to
+rid himself of Pierrette and the colonel both by making each the cause
+of the other's overthrow.
+
+The next day, after the court had risen, Vinet met the colonel and
+Rogron talking a walk together, according to their daily custom.
+
+Whenever the three men were seen in company the whole town talked of
+it. This triumvirate, held in horror by the sub-prefect, the
+magistracy, and the Tiphaine clique, was, on the other hand, a source
+of pride and vanity to the Liberals of Provins. Vinet was sole editor
+of the "Courrier" and the head of the party; the colonel, the working
+manager, was its arm; Rogron, by means of his purse, its nerves. The
+Tiphaines declared that the three men were always plotting evil to the
+government; the Liberals admired them as the defenders of the people.
+When Rogron turned to go home, recalled by a sense of his dinner-hour,
+Vinet stopped the colonel from following him by taking Gouraud's arm.
+
+"Well, colonel," he said, "I am going to take a fearful load off your
+shoulders; you can do better than marry Sylvie; if you play your cards
+properly you can marry that little Pierrette in two years' time."
+
+He thereupon related the Jesuit's manoeuvre and its effect on Sylvie.
+
+"What a skulking trick!" cried the colonel; "and spreading over years,
+too!"
+
+"Colonel," said Vinet, gravely, "Pierrette is a charming creature;
+with her you can be happy for the rest of your life; your health is so
+sound that the difference in your ages won't seem disproportionate.
+But, all the same, you mustn't think it an easy thing to change a
+dreadful fate to a pleasant one. To turn a woman who loves you into a
+friend and confidant is as perilous a business as crossing a river
+under fire of the enemy. Cavalry colonel as you are, and daring too,
+you must study the position and manoeuvre your forces with the same
+wisdom you have displayed hitherto, and which has won us our present
+position. If I get to be attorney-general you shall command the
+department. Oh! if you had been an elector we should be further
+advanced than we are now; I should have bought the votes of those two
+clerks by threatening them with the loss of their places, and we
+should have had a majority."
+
+The colonel had long been thinking about Pierrette, but he concealed
+his thoughts with the utmost dissimulation. His roughness to the child
+was only a mask; but she could not understand why the man who claimed
+to be her father's old comrade should usually treat her so ill, when
+sometimes, if he met her alone, he would chuck her under the chin and
+give her a friendly kiss. But after the conversation with Vinet
+relating to Sylvie's fears of marriage Gouraud began to seek
+opportunities to find Pierrette alone; the rough colonel made himself
+as soft as a cat; he told her how brave her father was and what a
+misfortune it had been for her that she lost him.
+
+A few days before Brigaut's arrival Sylvie had come suddenly upon
+Gouraud and Pierrette talking together. Instantly, jealousy rushed
+into her heart with monastic violence. Jealousy, eminently credulous
+and suspicious, is the passion in which fancy has most freedom, but
+for all that it does not give a person intelligence; on the contrary,
+it hinders them from having any; and in Sylvie's case jealousy only
+filled her with fantastic ideas. When (a few mornings later) she heard
+Brigaut's ditty, she jumped to the conclusion that the man who had
+used the words "Madam' le mariee," addressing them to Pierrette, must
+be the colonel. She was certain she was right, for she had noticed for
+a week past a change in his manners. He was the only man who, in her
+solitary life, had ever paid her any attention. Consequently she
+watched him with all her eyes, all her mind; and by giving herself up
+to hopes that were sometimes flourishing, sometimes blighted, she had
+brought the matter to such enormous proportions that she saw all
+things in a mental mirage. To use a common but excellent expression,
+by dint of looking intently she saw nothing. Alternately she repelled,
+admitted, and conquered the supposition of this rivalry. She compared
+herself with Pierrette; she was forty-two years old, with gray hair;
+Pierrette was delicately fair, with eyes soft enough to warm a
+withered heart. She had heard it said that men of fifty were apt to
+love young girls of just that kind. Before the colonel had come
+regularly to the house Sylvie had heard in the Tiphaines' salon
+strange stories of his life and morals. Old maids preserve in their
+love-affairs the exaggerated Platonic sentiments which young girls of
+twenty are wont to profess; they hold to these fixed doctrines like
+all who have little experience of life and no personal knowledge of
+how great social forces modify, impair, and bring to nought such grand
+and noble ideas. The mere thought of being jilted by the colonel was
+torture to Sylvie's brain. She lay in her bed going over and over her
+own desires, Pierrette's conduct, and the song which had awakened her
+with the word "marriage." Like the fool she was, instead of looking
+through the blinds to see the lover, she opened her window without
+reflecting that Pierrette would hear her. If she had had the common
+instinct of a spy she would have seen Brigaut, and the fatal drama
+then begun would never have taken place.
+
+It was Pierrette's duty, weak as she was, to take down the bars that
+closed the wooden shutters of the kitchen, which she opened and
+fastened back; then she opened in like manner the glass door leading
+from the corridor to the garden. She took the various brooms that were
+used for sweeping the carpets, the dining-room, the passages and
+stairs, together with the other utensils, with a care and
+particularity which no servant, not even a Dutchwoman, gives to her
+work. She hated reproof. Happiness for her was in seeing the cold blue
+pallid eyes of her cousin, not satisfied (that they never were), but
+calm, after glancing about her with the look of an owner,--that
+wonderful glance which sees what escapes even the most vigilant eyes
+of others. Pierrette's skin was moist with her labor when she returned
+to the kitchen to put it in order, and light the stove that she might
+carry up hot water to her two cousins (a luxury she never had for
+herself) and the means of lighting fires in their rooms. After this
+she laid the table for breakfast and lit the stove in the dining-room.
+For all these various fires she had to fetch wood and kindling from
+the cellar, leaving the warm rooms for a damp and chilly atmosphere.
+Such sudden transitions, made with the quickness of youth, often to
+escape a harsh word or obey an order, aggravated the condition of her
+health. She did not know she was ill, and yet she suffered. She began
+to have strange cravings; she liked raw vegetables and salads, and ate
+them secretly. The innocent child was quite unaware that her condition
+was that of serious illness which needed the utmost care. If Neraud,
+the Rogrons' doctor, had told this to Pierrette before Brigaut's
+arrival she would only have smiled; life was so bitter she could smile
+at death. But now her feelings changed; the child, to whose physical
+sufferings was added the anguish of Breton homesickness (a moral
+malady so well-known that colonels in the army allow for it among
+their men), was suddenly content to be in Provins. The sight of that
+yellow flower, the song, the presence of her friend, revived her as a
+plant long without water revives under rain. Unconsciously she wanted
+to live, and even thought she did not suffer.
+
+Pierrette slipped timidly into her cousin's bedroom, made the fire,
+left the hot water, said a few words, and went to wake Rogron and do
+the same offices for him. Then she went down to take in the milk, the
+bread, and the other provisions left by the dealers. She stood some
+time on the sill of the door hoping that Brigaut would have the sense
+to come to her; but by that time he was already on his way to Paris.
+
+She had finished the arrangement of the dining-room and was busy in
+the kitchen when she heard her cousin Sylvie coming down. Mademoiselle
+Rogron appeared in a brown silk dressing-gown and a cap with bows; her
+false front was awry, her night-gown showed above the silk wrapper,
+her slippers were down at heel. She gave an eye to everything and then
+came straight to Pierrette, who was awaiting her orders to know what
+to prepare for breakfast.
+
+"Ha! here you are, lovesick young lady!" said Sylvie, in a mocking
+tone.
+
+"What is it, cousin?"
+
+"You came into my room like a sly cat, and you crept out the same way,
+though you knew very well I had something to say to you."
+
+"To me?"
+
+"You had a serenade this morning, as if you were a princess."
+
+"A serenade!" exclaimed Pierrette.
+
+"A serenade!" said Sylvie, mimicking her; "and you've a lover, too."
+
+"What is a lover, cousin?"
+
+Sylvie avoided answering, and said:--
+
+"Do you dare to tell me, mademoiselle, that a man did not come under
+your window and talk to you of marriage?"
+
+Persecution had taught Pierrette the wariness of slaves; so she
+answered bravely:--
+
+"I don't know what you mean,--"
+
+"Who means?--your dog?" said Sylvie, sharply.
+
+"I should have said 'cousin,'" replied the girl, humbly.
+
+"And didn't you get up and go in your bare feet to the window?--which
+will give you an illness; and serve you right, too. And perhaps you
+didn't talk to your lover, either?"
+
+"No, cousin."
+
+"I know you have many faults, but I did not think you told lies. You
+had better think this over, mademoiselle; you will have to explain
+this affair to your cousin and to me, or your cousin will be obliged
+to take severe measures."
+
+The old maid, exasperated by jealousy and curiosity, meant to frighten
+the girl. Pierrette, like all those who suffer more than they have
+strength to bear, kept silence. Silence is the only weapon by which
+such victims can conquer; it baffles the Cossack charges of envy, the
+savage skirmishings of suspicion; it does at times give victory,
+crushing and complete,--for what is more complete than silence? it is
+absolute; it is one of the attributes of infinity. Sylvie watched
+Pierrette narrowly. The girl colored; but the color, instead of rising
+evenly, came out in patches on her cheekbones, in burning and
+significant spots. A mother, seeing that symptom of illness, would
+have changed her tone at once; she would have taken the child on her
+lap and questioned her; in fact, she would long ago have tenderly
+understood the signs of Pierrette's pure and perfect innocence; she
+would have seen her weakness and known that the disturbance of the
+digestive organs and the other functions of the body was about to
+affect the lungs. Those eloquent patches would have warned her of an
+imminent danger. But an old maid, one in whom the family instincts
+have never been awakened, to whom the needs of childhood and the
+precautions required for adolescence were unknown, had neither the
+indulgence nor the compassionate intelligence of a mother; such
+sufferings as those of Pierrette, instead of softening her heart only
+made it more callous.
+
+"She blushes, she is guilty!" thought Sylvie.
+
+Pierrette's silence was thus interpreted to her injury.
+
+"Pierrette," continued Sylvie, "before your cousin comes down we must
+have some talk together. Come," she said, in a rather softer tone,
+"shut the street door; if any one comes they will rung and we shall
+hear them."
+
+In spite of the damp mist which was rising from the river, Sylvie took
+Pierrette along the winding gravel path which led across the lawn to
+the edge of the rock terrace,--a picturesque little quay, covered with
+iris and aquatic plants. She now changed her tactics, thinking she
+might catch Pierrette tripping by softness; the hyena became a cat.
+
+"Pierrette," she said, "you are no longer a child; you are nearly
+fifteen, and it is not at all surprising that you should have a
+lover."
+
+"But, cousin," said Pierrette, raising her eyes with angelic sweetness
+to the cold, sour face of her cousin, "What is a lover?"
+
+It would have been impossible for Sylvie to define a lover with truth
+and decency to the girl's mind. Instead of seeing in that question the
+proof of adorable innocence, she considered it a piece of insincerity.
+
+"A lover, Pierrette, is a man who loves us and wishes to marry us."
+
+"Ah," said Pierrette, "when that happens in Brittany we call the young
+man a suitor."
+
+"Well, remember that in owning your feelings for a man you do no
+wrong, my dear. The wrong is in hiding them. Have you pleased some of
+the men who visit here?"
+
+"I don't think so, cousin."
+
+"Do you love any of them?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Certain?"
+
+"Quite certain."
+
+"Look at me, Pierrette."
+
+Pierrette looked at Sylvie.
+
+"A man called to you this morning in the square."
+
+Pierrette lowered her eyes.
+
+"You went to your window, you opened it, and you spoke to him."
+
+"No cousin, I went to look out and I saw a peasant."
+
+"Pierrette, you have much improved since you made your first
+communion; you have become pious and obedient, you love God and your
+relations; I am satisfied with you. I don't say this to puff you up
+with pride."
+
+The horrible creature had mistaken despondency, submission, the
+silence of wretchedness, for virtues!
+
+The sweetest of all consolations to suffering souls, to martyrs, to
+artists, in the worst of that divine agony which hatred and envy force
+upon them, is to meet with praise where they have hitherto found
+censure and injustice. Pierrette raised her grateful eyes to her
+cousin, feeling that she could almost forgive her for the sufferings
+she had caused.
+
+"But if it is all hypocrisy, if I find you a serpent that I have
+warmed in my bosom, you will be a wicked girl, an infamous creature!"
+
+"I think I have nothing to reproach myself with," said Pierrette, with
+a painful revulsion of her heart at the sudden change from unexpected
+praise to the tones of the hyena.
+
+"You know that to lie is a mortal sin?"
+
+"Yes, cousin."
+
+"Well, you are now under the eye of God," said the old maid, with a
+solemn gesture towards the sky; "swear to me that you did not know
+that peasant."
+
+"I will not swear," said Pierrette.
+
+"Ha! he was no peasant, you little viper."
+
+Pierrette rushed away like a frightened fawn terrified at her tone.
+Sylvie called her in a dreadful voice.
+
+"The bell is ringing," she answered.
+
+"Artful wretch!" thought Sylvie. "She is depraved in mind; and now I
+am certain the little adder has wound herself round the colonel. She
+has heard us say he was a baron. To be a baroness! little fool! Ah!
+I'll get rid of her, I'll apprentice her out, and soon too!"
+
+Sylvie was so lost in thought that she did not notice her brother
+coming down the path and bemoaning the injury the frost had done to
+his dahlias.
+
+"Sylvie! what are you thinking about? I thought you were looking at
+the fish; sometimes they jump out of the water."
+
+"No," said Sylvie.
+
+"How did you sleep?" and he began to tell her about his own dreams.
+"Don't you think my skin is getting /tabid/?"--a word in the Rogron
+vocabulary.
+
+Ever since Rogron had been in love,--but let us not profane the word,
+--ever since he had desired to marry Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf, he
+was very uneasy about himself and his health. At this moment Pierrette
+came down the garden steps and called to them from a distance that
+breakfast was ready. At sight of her cousin, Sylvie's skin turned
+green and yellow, her bile was in commotion. She looked at the floor
+of the corridor and declared that Pierrette ought to rub it.
+
+"I will rub it now if you wish," said the little angel, not aware of
+the injury such work may do to a young girl.
+
+The dining-room was irreproachably in order. Sylvie sat down and
+pretended all through breakfast to want this, that, and the other
+thing which she would never have thought of in a quieter moment, and
+which she now asked for only to make Pierrette rise again and again
+just as the child was beginning to eat her food. But such mere teasing
+was not enough; she wanted a subject on which to find fault, and was
+angry with herself for not finding one. She scarcely answered her
+brother's silly remarks, yet she looked at him only; her eyes avoided
+Pierrette. Pierrette was deeply conscious of all this. She brought the
+milk mixed with cream for each cousin in a large silver goblet, after
+heating it carefully in the /bain-marie/. The brother and sister
+poured in the coffee made by Sylvie herself on the table. When Sylvie
+had carefully prepared hers, she saw an atom of coffee-grounds
+floating on the surface. On this the storm broke forth.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked Rogron.
+
+"The matter is that mademoiselle has put dust in my milk. Do you
+suppose I am going to drink coffee with ashes in it? Well, I am not
+surprised; no one can do two things at once. She wasn't thinking of
+the milk! a blackbird might have flown through the kitchen to-day and
+she wouldn't have seen it! how should she see the dust flying! and
+then it was my coffee, ha! that didn't signify!"
+
+As she spoke she was laying on the side of her plate the coffee-
+grounds that had run through the filter.
+
+"But, cousin, that is coffee," said Pierrette.
+
+"Oh! then it is I who tell lies, is it?" cried Sylvie, looking at
+Pierrette and blasting her with a fearful flash of anger from her
+eyes.
+
+Organizations which have not been exhausted by powerful emotions often
+have a vast amount of the vital fluid at their service. This
+phenomenon of the extreme clearness of the eye in moments of anger was
+the more marked in Mademoiselle Rogron because she had often exercised
+the power of her eyes in her shop by opening them to their full extent
+for the purpose of inspiring her dependents with salutary fear.
+
+"You had better dare to give me the lie!" continued Sylvie; "you
+deserve to be sent from the table to go and eat by yourself in the
+kitchen."
+
+"What's the matter with you two?" cried Rogron, "you are as cross as
+bears this morning."
+
+"Mademoiselle knows what I have against her," said Sylvie. "I leave
+her to make up her mind before speaking to you; for I mean to show her
+more kindness than she deserves."
+
+Pierrette was looking out of the window to avoid her cousin's eyes,
+which frightened her.
+
+"Look at her! she pays no more attention to what I am saying than if I
+were that sugar-basin! And yet mademoiselle has a sharp ear; she can
+hear and answer from the top of the house when some one talks to her
+from below. She is perversity itself,--perversity, I say; and you
+needn't expect any good of her; do you hear me, Jerome?"
+
+"What has she done wrong?" asked Rogron.
+
+"At her age, too! to begin so young!" screamed the angry old maid.
+
+Pierrette rose to clear the table and give herself something to do,
+for she could hardly bear the scene any longer. Though such language
+was not new to her, she had never been able to get used to it. Her
+cousin's rage seemed to accuse her of some crime. She imagined what
+her fury would be if she came to know about Brigaut. Perhaps her
+cousin would have him sent away, and she should lose him! All the many
+thoughts, the deep and rapid thoughts of a slave came to her, and she
+resolved to keep absolute silence about a circumstance in which her
+conscience told her there was nothing wrong. But the cruel, bitter
+words she had been made to hear and the wounding suspicion so shocked
+her that as she reached the kitchen she was taken with a convulsion of
+the stomach and turned deadly sick. She dared not complain; she was
+not sure that any one would help her. When she returned to the dining-
+room she was white as a sheet, and, saying she was not well, she
+started to go to bed, dragging herself up step by step by the baluster
+and thinking that she was going to die. "Poor Brigaut!" she thought.
+
+"The girl is ill," said Rogron.
+
+"She ill! That's only /shamming/," replied Sylvie, in a loud voice
+that Pierrette might hear. "She was well enough this morning, I can
+tell you."
+
+This last blow struck Pierrette to the earth; she went to bed weeping
+and praying to God to take her out of this world.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+DOMESTIC TYRANNY
+
+For a month past Rogron had ceased to carry the "Constitutionnel" to
+Gouraud; the colonel came obsequiously to fetch his paper, gossip a
+little, and take Rogron off to walk if the weather was fine. Sure of
+seeing the colonel and being able to question him, Sylvie dressed
+herself as coquettishly as she knew how. The old maid thought she was
+attractive in a green gown, a yellow shawl with a red border, and a
+white bonnet with straggling gray feathers. About the hour when the
+colonel usually came Sylvie stationed herself in the salon with her
+brother, whom she had compelled to stay in the house in his dressing-
+gown and slippers.
+
+"It is a fine day, colonel," said Rogron, when Gouraud with his heavy
+step entered the room. "But I'm not dressed; my sister wanted to go
+out, and I was going to keep the house. Wait for me; I'll be ready
+soon."
+
+So saying, Rogron left Sylvie alone with the colonel.
+
+"Where were you going? you are dressed divinely," said Gouraud, who
+noticed a certain solemnity on the pock-marked face of the old maid.
+
+"I wanted very much to go out, but my little cousin is ill, and I
+cannot leave her."
+
+"What is the matter with her?"
+
+"I don't know; she had to go to bed."
+
+Gouraud's caution, not to say his distrust, was constantly excited by
+the results of his alliance with Vinet. It certainly appeared that the
+lawyer had got the lion's share in their enterprise. Vinet controlled
+the paper, he reigned as sole master over it, he took the revenues;
+whereas the colonel, the responsible editor, earned little. Vinet and
+Cournant had done the Rogrons great services; whereas Gouraud, a
+colonel on half-pay, could do nothing. Who was to be deputy? Vinet.
+Who was the chief authority in the party? Vinet. Whom did the liberals
+all consult? Vinet. Moreover, the colonel knew fully as well as Vinet
+himself the extent and depth of the passion suddenly aroused in Rogron
+by the beautiful Bathilde de Chargeboeuf. This passion had now become
+intense, like all the last passions of men. Bathilde's voice made him
+tremble. Absorbed in his desires Rogron hid them; he dared not hope
+for such a marriage. To sound him, the colonel mentioned that he was
+thinking himself of asking for Bathilde's hand. Rogron turned pale at
+the thought of such a formidable rival, and had since then shown
+coldness and even hatred to Gouraud.
+
+Thus Vinet reigned supreme in the Rogron household while he, the
+colonel, had no hold there except by the extremely hypothetical tie of
+his mendacious affection for Sylvie, which it was not yet clear that
+Sylvie reciprocated. When the lawyer told him of the priest's
+manoeuvre, and advised him to break with Sylvie and marry Pierrette,
+he certainly flattered Gouraud's foible; but after analyzing the inner
+purpose of that advice and examining the ground all about him, the
+colonel thought he perceived in his ally the intention of separating
+him from Sylvie, and profiting by her fears to throw the whole Rogron
+property into the hands of Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf.
+
+Therefore, when the colonel was left alone with Sylvie his
+perspicacity possessed itself immediately of certain signs which
+betrayed her uneasiness. He saw at once that she was under arms and
+had made this plan for seeing him alone. As he already suspected Vinet
+of playing him some trick, he attributed the conference to the
+instigation of the lawyer, and was instantly on his guard, as he would
+have been in an enemy's country,--with an eye all about him, an ear to
+the faintest sound, his mind on the qui vive, and his hand on a
+weapon. The colonel had the defect of never believing a single word
+said to him by a woman; so that when the old maid brought Pierrette on
+the scene, and told him she had gone to bed before midday, he
+concluded that Sylvie had locked her up by way of punishment and out
+of jealousy.
+
+"She is getting to be quite pretty, that little thing," he said with
+an easy air.
+
+"She will be pretty," replied Mademoiselle Rogron.
+
+"You ought to send her to Paris and put her in a shop," continued the
+colonel. "She would make her fortune. The milliners all want pretty
+girls."
+
+"Is that really your advice?" asked Sylvie, in a troubled voice.
+
+"Good!" thought the colonel, "I was right. Vinet advised me to marry
+Pierrette just to spoil my chance with the old harridan. But," he said
+aloud, "what else can you do with her? There's that beautiful girl
+Bathilde de Chargeboeuf, noble and well-connected, reduced to single-
+blessedness,--nobody will have her. Pierrette has nothing, and she'll
+never marry. As for beauty, what is it? To me, for example, youth and
+beauty are nothing; for haven't I been a captain of cavalry in the
+imperial guard, and carried my spurs into all the capitals of Europe,
+and known all the handsomest women of these capitals? Don't talk to
+me; I tell you youth and beauty are devilishly common and silly. At
+forty-eight," he went on, adding a few years to his age, to match
+Sylvie's, "after surviving the retreat from Moscow and going through
+that terrible campaign of France, a man is broken down; I'm nothing
+but an old fellow now. A woman like you would pet me and care for me,
+and her money, joined to my poor pension, would give me ease in my old
+days; of course I should prefer such a woman to a little minx who
+would worry the life out of me, and be thirty years old, with
+passions, when I should be sixty, with rheumatism. At my age, a man
+considers and calculates. To tell you the truth between ourselves, I
+should not wish to have children."
+
+Sylvie's face was an open book to the colonel during this tirade, and
+her next question proved to him Vinet's perfidy.
+
+"Then you don't love Pierrette?" she said.
+
+"Heavens! are you out of your mind, my dear Sylvie?" he cried. "Can
+those who have no teeth crack nuts? Thank God I've got some common-
+sense and know what I'm about."
+
+Sylvie thus reassured resolved not to show her own hand, and thought
+herself very shrewd in putting her own ideas into her brother's mouth.
+
+"Jerome," she said, "thought of the match."
+
+"How could your brother take up such an incongruous idea? Why, it is
+only a few days ago that, in order to find out his secrets, I told him
+I loved Bathilde. He turned as white as your collar."
+
+"My brother! does he love Bathilde?" asked Sylvie.
+
+"Madly,--and yet Bathilde is only after his money." ("One for you,
+Vinet!" thought the colonel.) "I can't understand why he should have
+told you that about Pierrette. No, Sylvie," he said, taking her hand
+and pressing it in a certain way, "since you have opened this matter"
+(he drew nearer to her), "well" (he kissed her hand; as a cavalry
+captain he had already proved his courage), "let me tell you that I
+desire no wife but you. Though such a marriage may look like one of
+convenience, I feel, on my side, a sincere affection for you."
+
+"But if I /wish/ you to marry Pierrette? if I leave her my fortune--
+eh, colonel?"
+
+"But I don't want to be miserable in my home, and in less than ten
+years see a popinjay like Julliard hovering round my wife and
+addressing verses to her in the newspapers. I'm too much of a man to
+stand that. No, I will never make a marriage that is disproportionate
+in age."
+
+"Well, colonel, we will talk seriously of this another time," said
+Sylvie, casting a glance upon him which she supposed to be full of
+love, though, in point of fact, it was a good deal like that of an
+ogress. Her cold, blue lips of a violet tinge drew back from the
+yellow teeth, and she thought she smiled.
+
+"I'm ready," said Rogron, coming in and carrying off the colonel, who
+bowed in a lover-like way to the old maid.
+
+Gouraud determined to press on his marriage with Sylvie, and make
+himself master of the house; resolving to rid himself, through his
+influence over Sylvie during the honeymoon, of Bathilde and Celeste
+Habert. So, during their walk, he told Rogron he had been joking the
+other day; that he had no real intention of aspiring to Bathilde; that
+he was not rich enough to marry a woman without fortune; and then he
+confided to him his real wishes, declaring that he had long chosen
+Sylvie for her good qualities,--in short, he aspired to the honor of
+being Rogron's brother-in-law.
+
+"Ah, colonel, my dear baron! if nothing is wanting but my consent you
+have it with no further delay than the law requires," cried Rogron,
+delighted to be rid of his formidable rival.
+
+Sylvie spent the morning in her own room considering how the new
+household could be arranged. She determined to build a second storey
+for her brother and to furnish the rest for herself and her husband;
+but she also resolved, in the true old-maidish spirit, to subject the
+colonel to certain proofs by which to judge of his heart and his
+morals before she finally committed herself. She was still suspicious,
+and wanted to make sure that Pierrette had no private intercourse with
+the colonel.
+
+Pierrette came down before the dinner-hour to lay the table. Sylvie
+had been forced to cook the dinner, and had sworn at that "cursed
+Pierrette" for a spot she had made on her gown,--wasn't it plain that
+if Pierrette had done her own work Sylvie wouldn't have got that
+grease-spot on her silk dress?
+
+"Oh, here you are, /peakling/? You are like the dog of the marshal who
+woke up as soon as the saucepans rattled. Ha! you want us to think you
+are ill, you little liar!"
+
+That idea: "You did not tell the truth about what happened in the
+square this morning, therefore you lie in everything," was a hammer
+with which Sylvie battered the head and also the heart of the poor
+girl incessantly.
+
+To Pierrette's great astonishment Sylvie sent her to dress in her best
+clothes after dinner. The liveliest imagination is never up to the
+level of the activity which suspicion excites in the mind of an old
+maid. In this particular case, this particular old maid carried the
+day against politicians, lawyers, notaries, and all other self-
+interests. Sylvie determined to consult Vinet, after examining herself
+into all the suspicious circumstances. She kept Pierrette close to
+her, so as to find out from the girl's face whether the colonel had
+told her the truth.
+
+On this particular evening the Chargeboeuf ladies were the first to
+arrive. Bathilde, by Vinet's advice, had become more elaborate in her
+dress. She now wore a charming gown of blue velveteen, with the same
+transparent fichu, garnet pendants in her ears, her hair in ringlets,
+the wily /jeannette/ round her throat, black satin slippers, gray silk
+stockings, and /gants de Suede/; add to these things the manners of a
+queen and the coquetry of a young girl determined to capture Rogron.
+Her mother, calm and dignified, retained, as did her daughter, a
+certain aristocratic insolence, with which the two women hedged
+themselves and preserved the spirit of their caste. Bathilde was a
+woman of intelligence, a fact which Vinet alone had discovered during
+the two months' stay the ladies had made at his house. When he had
+fully fathomed the mind of the girl, wounded and disappointed as it
+was by the fruitlessness of her beauty and her youth, and enlightened
+by the contempt she felt for the men of a period in which money was
+the only idol, Vinet, himself surprised, exclaimed,--
+
+"If I could only have married you, Bathilde, I should to-day be Keeper
+of the Seals. I should call myself Vinet de Chargeboeuf, and take my
+seat as deputy of the Right."
+
+Bathilde had no vulgar idea in her marriage intentions. She did not
+marry to be a mother, nor to possess a husband; she married for
+freedom, to gain a responsible position, to be called "madame," and to
+act as men act. Rogron was nothing but a name to her; she expected to
+make something of the fool,--a voting deputy, for instance, whose
+instigator she would be; moreover, she longed to avenge herself on her
+family, who had taken no notice of a girl without money. Vinet had
+much enlarged and strengthened her ideas by admiring and approving
+them.
+
+"My dear Bathilde," he said, while explaining to her the influence of
+women, and showing her the sphere of action in which she ought to
+work, "do you suppose that Tiphaine, a man of the most ordinary
+capacity, could ever get to be a judge of the Royal court in Paris by
+himself? No, it is Madame Tiphaine who has got him elected deputy, and
+it is she who will push him when they get to Paris. Her mother, Madame
+Roguin, is a shrewd woman, who does what she likes with the famous
+banker du Tillet, a crony of Nucingen, and both of them allies of the
+Kellers. The administration is on the best of terms with those lynxes
+of the bank. There is no reason why Tiphaine should not be judge,
+through his wife, of a Royal court. Marry Rogron; we'll have him
+elected deputy from Provins as soon as I gain another precinct in the
+Seine-et-Marne. You can then get him a place as receiver-general,
+where he'll have nothing to do but sign his name. We shall belong to
+the opposition /if/ the Liberals triumph, but if the Bourbons remain--
+ah! then we shall lean gently, gently towards the centre. Besides, you
+must remember Rogron can't live forever, and then you can marry a
+titled man. In short, put yourself in a good position, and the
+Chargeboeufs will be ready enough to serve us. Your poverty has no
+doubt taught you, as mine did me, to know what men are worth. We must
+make use of them as we do of post-horses. A man, or a woman, will take
+us along to such or such a distance."
+
+Vinet ended by making Bathilde a small edition of Catherine de
+Medicis. He left his wife at home, rejoiced to be alone with her two
+children, while he went every night to the Rogrons' with Madame and
+Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf. He arrived there in all the glory of
+better circumstances. His spectacles were of gold, his waistcoat silk;
+a white cravat, black trousers, thin boots, a black coat made in
+Paris, and a gold watch and chain, made up his apparel. In place of
+the former Vinet, pale and thin, snarling and gloomy, the present
+Vinet bore himself with the air and manner of a man of importance; he
+marched boldly forward, certain of success, with that peculiar show of
+security which belongs to lawyers who know the hidden places of the
+law. His sly little head was well-brushed, his chin well-shaved, which
+gave him a mincing though frigid look, that made him seem agreeable in
+the style of Robespierre. Certainly he would make a fine attorney-
+general, endowed with elastic, mischievous, and even murderous
+eloquence, or an orator of the shrewd type of Benjamin Constant. The
+bitterness and the hatred which formerly actuated him had now turned
+into soft-spoken perfidy; the poison was transformed into anodyne.
+
+"Good-evening, my dear; how are you?" said Madame de Chargeboeuf,
+greeting Sylvie.
+
+Bathilde went straight to the fireplace, took off her bonnet, looked
+at herself in the glass, and placed her pretty foot on the fender that
+Rogron might admire it.
+
+"What is the matter with you?" she said to him, looking directly in
+his face. "You have not bowed to me. Pray why should we put on our
+best velvet gowns to please you?"
+
+She pushed past Pierrette to lay down her hat, which the latter took
+from her hand, and which she let her take exactly as though she were a
+servant. Men are supposed to be ferocious, and tigers too; but neither
+tigers, vipers, diplomatists, lawyers, executioners or kings ever
+approach, in their greatest atrocities, the gentle cruelty, the
+poisoned sweetness, the savage disdain of one young woman for another,
+when she thinks herself superior in birth, or fortune, or grace, and
+some question of marriage, or precedence, or any of the feminine
+rivalries, is raised. The "Thank you, mademoiselle," which Bathilde
+said to Pierrette was a poem in many strophes. She was named Bathilde,
+and the other Pierrette. She was a Chargeboeuf, the other a Lorrain.
+Pierrette was small and weak, Bathilde was tall and full of life.
+Pierrette was living on charity, Bathilde and her mother lived on
+their means. Pierrette wore a stuff gown with a chemisette, Bathilde
+made the velvet of hers undulate. Bathilde had the finest shoulders in
+the department, and the arm of a queen; Pierrette's shoulder-blades
+were skin and bone. Pierrette was Cinderella, Bathilde was the fairy.
+Bathilde was about to marry, Pierrette was to die a maid. Bathilde was
+adored, Pierrette was loved by none. Bathilde's hair was ravishingly
+dressed, she had so much taste; Pierrette's was hidden beneath her
+Breton cap, and she knew nothing of the fashions. Moral, Bathilde was
+everything, Pierrette nothing. The proud little Breton girl understood
+this tragic poem.
+
+"Good-evening, little girl," said Madame de Chargeboeuf, from the
+height of her condescending grandeur, and in the tone of voice which
+her pinched nose gave her.
+
+Vinet put the last touch to this sort of insult by looking fixedly at
+Pierrette and saying, in three keys, "Oh! oh! oh! how fine we are
+to-night, Pierrette!"
+
+"Fine!" said the poor child; "you should say that to Mademoiselle de
+Chargeboeuf, not to me."
+
+"Oh! she is always beautifully dressed," replied the lawyer. "Isn't
+she, Rogron?" he added, turning to the master of the house, and
+grasping his hand.
+
+"Yes," said Rogron.
+
+"Why do you force him to say what he does not think?" said Bathilde;
+"nothing about me pleases him. Isn't that true?" she added, going up
+to Rogron and standing before him. "Look at me, and say if it isn't
+true."
+
+Rogron looked at her from head to foot, and gently closed his eyes
+like a cat whose head is being scratched.
+
+"You are too beautiful," he said; "too dangerous."
+
+"Why?"
+
+Rogron looked at the fire and was silent. Just then Mademoiselle
+Habert entered the room, followed by the colonel.
+
+Celeste Habert, who had now become the common enemy, could only reckon
+Sylvie on her side; nevertheless, everybody present showed her the
+more civility and amiable attention because each was undermining her.
+Her brother, though no longer able to be on the scene of action, was
+well aware of what was going on, and as soon as he perceived that his
+sister's hopes were killed he became an implacable and terrible
+antagonist to the Rogrons.
+
+Every one will immediately picture to themselves Mademoiselle Habert
+when they know that if she had not kept an institution for young
+ladies she would still have had the air of a school-mistress. School-
+mistresses have a way of their own in putting on their caps. Just as
+old Englishwomen have acquired a monopoly in turbans, school-
+mistresses have a monopoly of these caps. Flowers nod above the frame-
+work, flowers that are more than artificial; lying by in closets for
+years the cap is both new and old, even on the day it is first worn.
+These spinsters make it a point of honor to resemble the lay figures
+of a painter; they sit on their hips, never on their chairs. When any
+one speaks to them they turn their whole busts instead of simply
+turning their heads; and when their gowns creak one is tempted to
+believe that the mechanism of these beings is out of order.
+Mademoiselle Habert, an ideal of her species, had a stern eye, a grim
+mouth, and beneath her wrinkled chin the strings of her cap, always
+limp and faded, floated as she moved. Two moles, rather large and
+brown, adorned that chin, and from them sprouted hairs which she
+allowed to grow rampant like clematis. And finally, to complete her
+portrait, she took snuff, and took it ungracefully.
+
+The company went to work at their boston. Mademoiselle Habert sat
+opposite to Sylvie, with the colonel at her side opposite to Madame de
+Chargeboeuf. Bathilde was near her mother and Rogron. Sylvie placed
+Pierrette between herself and the colonel; Rogron had set out a second
+card-table, in case other company arrived. Two lamps were on the
+chimney-piece between the candelabra and the clock, and the tables
+were lighted by candles at forty sous a pound, paid for by the price
+of the cards.
+
+"Come, Pierrette, take your work, my dear," said Sylvie, with
+treacherous softness, noticing that the girl was watching the
+colonel's game.
+
+She usually affected to treat Pierrette well before company. This
+deception irritated the honest Breton girl, and made her despise her
+cousin. She took her embroidery, but as she drew her stitches she
+still watched Gouraud's play. Gouraud behaved as if he did not know
+the girl was near him. Sylvie noticed this apparent indifference and
+thought it extremely suspicious. Presently she undertook a /grande
+misere/ in hearts, the pool being full of counters, besides containing
+twenty-seven sous. The rest of the company had now arrived; among them
+the deputy-judge Desfondrilles, who for the last two months had
+abandoned the Tiphaine party and connected himself more or less with
+the Vinets. He was standing before the chimney-piece, with his back to
+the fire and the tails of his coat over his arms, looking round the
+fine salon of which Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf was the shining
+ornament; for it really seemed as if all the reds of its decoration
+had been made expressly to enhance her style of beauty. Silence
+reigned; Pierrette was watching the game, Sylvie's attention was
+distracted from her by the interest of the /grande misere/.
+
+"Play that," said Pierrette to the colonel, pointing to a heart in his
+hand.
+
+The colonel began a sequence in hearts; the hearts all lay between
+himself and Sylvie; the colonel won her ace, though it was protected
+by five small hearts.
+
+"That's not fair!" she cried. "Pierrette saw my hand, and the colonel
+took her advice."
+
+"But, mademoiselle," said Celeste, "it was the colonel's game to play
+hearts after you began them."
+
+The scene made Monsieur Desfondrilles smile; his was a keen mind,
+which found much amusement in watching the play of all the self-
+interests in Provins.
+
+"Yes, it was certainly the colonel's game," said Cournant the notary,
+not knowing what the question was.
+
+Sylvie threw a look at Mademoiselle Habert,--one of those glances
+which pass from old maid to old maid, feline and cruel.
+
+"Pierrette, you did see my hand," said Sylvie fixing her eyes on the
+girl.
+
+"No, cousin."
+
+"I was looking at you all," said the deputy-judge, "and I can swear
+that Pierrette saw no one's hand but the colonel's."
+
+"Pooh!" said Gouraud, alarmed, "little girls know how to slide their
+eyes into everything."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Sylvie.
+
+"Yes," continued Gouraud. "I dare say she looked into your hand to
+play you a trick. Didn't you, little one?"
+
+"No," said the truthful Breton, "I wouldn't do such a thing; if I had,
+it would have been in my cousin's interests."
+
+"You know you are a story-teller and a little fool," cried Sylvie.
+"After what happened this morning do you suppose I can believe a word
+you say? You are a--"
+
+Pierrette did not wait for Sylvie to finish her sentence; foreseeing a
+torrent of insults, she rushed away without a light and ran to her
+room. Sylvie turned white with anger and muttered between her teeth,
+"She shall pay for this!"
+
+"Shall you pay for the /misere/?" said Madame de Chargeboeuf.
+
+As she spoke Pierrette struck her head against the door of the passage
+which some one had left open.
+
+"Good! I'm glad of it," cried Sylvie, as they heard the blow.
+
+"She must be hurt," said Desfondrilles.
+
+"She deserves it," replied Sylvie.
+
+"It was a bad blow," said Mademoiselle Habert.
+
+Sylvie thought she might escape paying her /misere/ if she went to see
+after Pierrette, but Madame de Chargeboeuf stopped her.
+
+"Pay us first," she said, laughing; "you will forget it when you come
+back."
+
+The remark, based on the old maid's trickery and her bad faith in
+paying her debts at cards was approved by the others. Sylvie sat down
+and thought no more of Pierrette,--an indifference which surprised no
+one. When the game was over, about half past nine o'clock, she flung
+herself into an easy chair at the corner of the fireplace and did not
+even rise as her guests departed. The colonel was torturing her; she
+did not know what to think of him.
+
+"Men are so false!" she cried, as she went to bed.
+
+Pierrette had given herself a frightful blow on the head, just above
+the ear, at the spot where young girls part their hair when they put
+their "front hair" in curlpapers. The next day there was a large
+swelling.
+
+"God has punished you," said Sylvie at the breakfast table. "You
+disobeyed me; you treated me with disrespect in leaving the room
+before I had finished my sentence; you got what you deserved."
+
+"Nevertheless," said Rogron, "she ought to put on a compress of salt
+and water."
+
+"Oh, it is nothing at all, cousin," said Pierrette.
+
+The poor child had reached a point where even such a remark seemed to
+her a proof of kindness.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE LOVES OF JACQUES AND PIERRETTE
+
+The week ended as it had begun, in continual torture. Sylvie grew
+ingenious, and found refinements of tyranny with almost savage
+cruelty; the red Indians might have taken a lesson from her. Pierrette
+dared not complain of her vague sufferings, nor of the actual pains
+she now felt in her head. The origin of her cousin's present anger was
+the non-revelation of Brigaut's arrival. With Breton obstinacy
+Pierrette was determined to keep silence,--a resolution that is
+perfectly explicable. It is easy to see how her thoughts turned to
+Brigaut, fearing some danger for him if he were discovered, yet
+instinctively longing to have him near her, and happy in knowing he
+was in Provins. What joy to have seen him! That single glimpse was
+like the look an exile casts upon his country, or the martyr lifts to
+heaven, where his eyes, gifted with second-sight, can enter while
+flames consume his body.
+
+Pierrette's glance had been so thoroughly understood by the major's
+son that, as he planed his planks or took his measures or joined his
+wood, he was working his brains to find out some way of communicating
+with her. He ended by choosing the simplest of all schemes. At a
+certain hour of the night Pierrette must lower a letter by a string
+from her window. In the midst of the girl's own sufferings, she too
+was sustained by the hope of being able to communicate with Brigaut.
+The same desire was in both hearts; parted, they understood each
+other! At every shock to her heart, every throb of pain in her head,
+Pierrette said to herself, "Brigaut is here!" and that thought enabled
+her to live without complaint.
+
+One morning in the market, Brigaut, lying in wait, was able to get
+near her. Though he saw her tremble and turn pale, like an autumn leaf
+about to flutter down, he did not lose his head, but quietly bought
+fruit of the market-woman with whom Sylvie was bargaining. He found
+his chance of slipping a note to Pierrette, all the while joking the
+woman with the ease of a man accustomed to such manoeuvres; so cool
+was he in action, though the blood hummed in his ears and rushed
+boiling through his veins and arteries. He had the firmness of a
+galley-slave without, and the shrinkings of innocence within him,--
+like certain mothers in their moments of mortal trial, when held
+between two dangers, two catastrophes.
+
+Pierrette's inward commotion was like Brigaut's. She slipped the note
+into the pocket of her apron. The hectic spots upon her cheekbones
+turned to a cherry-scarlet. These two children went through, all
+unknown to themselves, many more emotions than go to the make-up of a
+dozen ordinary loves. This moment in the market-place left in their
+souls a well-spring of passionate feeling. Sylvie, who did not
+recognize the Breton accent, took no notice of Brigaut, and Pierrette
+went home safely with her treasure.
+
+The letters of these two poor children were fated to serve as
+documents in a terrible judicial inquiry; otherwise, without the fatal
+circumstances that occasioned that inquiry, they would never have been
+heard of. Here is the one which Pierrette read that night in her
+chamber:--
+
+  My dear Pierrette,--At midnight, when everybody is asleep but me,
+  who am watching you, I will come every night under your window.
+  Let down a string long enough to reach me; it will not make any
+  noise; you must fasten to the end of it whatever you write to me.
+  I will tie my letter in the same way. I hear /they/ have taught
+  you to read and write,--those wicked relations who were to do you
+  good, and have done you so much harm. You, Pierrette, the daughter
+  of a colonel who died for France, reduced by those monsters to be
+  their servant! That is where all your pretty color and health have
+  gone. My Pierrette, what has become of her? what have they done
+  with her. I see plainly you are not the same, not happy. Oh!
+  Pierrette, let us go back to Brittany. I can earn enough now to
+  give you what you need; for you yourself can earn three francs a
+  day and I can earn four or five; and thirty sous is all I want to
+  live on. Ah! Pierrette, how I have prayed the good God for you
+  ever since I came here! I have asked him to give me all your
+  sufferings, and you all pleasures. Why do you stay with them? why
+  do they keep you? Your grandmother is more to you than they. They
+  are vipers; they have taken your gaiety away from you. You do not
+  even walk as you once did in Brittany. Let us go back. I am here
+  to serve you, to do your will; tell me what you wish. If you need
+  money I have a hundred and fifty francs; I can send them up by the
+  string, though I would like to kiss your dear hands and lay the
+  money in them. Ah, dear Pierrette, it is a long time now that the
+  blue sky has been overcast for me. I have not had two hours'
+  happiness since I put you into that diligence of evil. And when I
+  saw you the other morning, looking like a shadow, I could not
+  reach you; that hag of a cousin came between us. But at least we
+  can have the consolation of praying to God together every Sunday
+  in church; perhaps he will hear us all the more when we pray
+  together.
+
+  Not good-by, my dear, Pierrette, but /to-night/.
+
+This letter so affected Pierrette that she sat for more than an hour
+reading and re-reading and gazing at it. Then she remembered with
+anguish that she had nothing to write with. She summoned courage to
+make the difficult journey from her garret to the dining-room, where
+she obtained pen, paper, and ink, and returned safely without waking
+her terrible cousin. A few minutes before midnight she had finished
+the following letter:--
+
+  My Friend,--Oh! yes, my friend; for there is no one but you,
+  Jacques, and my grandmother to love me. God forgive me, but you
+  are the only two persons whom I love, both alike, neither more nor
+  less. I was too little to know my dear mamma; but you, Jacques,
+  and my grandmother, and my grandfather,--God grant him heaven, for
+  he suffered much from his ruin, which was mine,--but you two who
+  are left, I love you both, unhappy as I am. Indeed, to know how
+  much I love you, you will have to know how much I suffer; but I
+  don't wish that, it would grieve you too much. /They/ speak to me
+  as we would not speak to a dog; /they/ treat me like the worst of
+  girls; and yet I do examine myself before God, and I cannot find
+  that I do wrong by them. Before you sang to me the marriage song I
+  saw the mercy of God in my sufferings; for I had prayed to him to
+  take me from the world, and I felt so ill I said to myself, "God
+  hears me!" But, Jacques, now you are here, I want to live and go
+  back to Brittany, to my grandmamma who loves me, though /they/ say
+  she stole eight thousand francs of mine. Jacques, is that so? If
+  they are mine could you get them! But it is not true, for if my
+  grandmother had eight thousand francs she would not live at Saint-
+  Jacques.
+
+  I don't want to trouble her last days, my kind, good grandmamma,
+  with the knowledge of my troubles; she might die of it. Ah! if she
+  knew they made her grandchild scrub the pots and pans,--she who
+  used to say to me, when I wanted to help her after her troubles,
+  "Don't touch that, my darling; leave it--leave it--you will spoil
+  your pretty fingers." Ah! my hands are never clean now. Sometimes
+  I can hardly carry the basket home from market, it cuts my arm.
+  Still I don't think my cousins mean to be cruel; but it is their
+  way always to scold, and it seems that I have no right to leave
+  them. My cousin Rogron is my guardian. One day when I wanted to
+  run away because I could not bear it, and told them so, my cousin
+  Sylvie said the gendarmes would go after me, for the law was my
+  master. Oh! I know now that cousins cannot take the place of
+  father or mother, any more than the saints can take the place of
+  God.
+
+  My poor Jacques, what do you suppose I could do with your money?
+  Keep it for our journey. Oh! how I think of you and Pen-Hoel, and
+  the big pong,--that's where we had our only happy days. I shall
+  have no more, for I feel I am going from bad to worse. I am very
+  ill, Jacques. I have dreadful pains in my head, and in my bones,
+  and back, which kill me, and I have no appetite except for horrid
+  things,--roots and leaves and such things. Sometimes I cry, when I
+  am all alone, for they won't let me do anything I like if they
+  know it, not even cry. I have to hide to offer my tears to Him to
+  whom we owe the mercies which we call afflictions. It must have
+  been He who gave you the blessed thought to come and sing the
+  marriage song beneath my window. Ah! Jacques, my cousin heard you,
+  and she said I had a lover. If you wish to be my lover, love me
+  well. I promise to love you always, as I did in the past, and to
+  be
+Your faithful servant,
+Pierrette Lorrain.
+
+  You will love me always, won't you?
+
+
+She had brought a crust of bread from the kitchen, in which she now
+made a hole for the letter, and fastened it like a weight to her
+string. At midnight, having opened her window with extreme caution,
+she lowered the letter with the crust, which made no noise against
+either the wall of the house or the blinds. Presently she felt the
+string pulled by Brigaut, who broke it and then crept softly away.
+When he reached the middle of the square she could see him
+indistinctly by the starlight; but he saw her quite clearly in the
+zone of light thrown by the candle. The two children stood thus for
+over an hour, Pierrette making him signs to go, he starting, she
+remaining, he coming back to his post, and Pierrette again signing
+that he must leave her. This was repeated till the child closed her
+window, went to bed, and blew out the candle. Once in bed she fell
+asleep, happy in heart though suffering in body,--she had Brigaut's
+letter under her pillow. She slept as the persecuted sleep,--a slumber
+bright with angels; that slumber full of heavenly arabesques, in
+atmospheres of gold and lapis-lazuli, perceived and given to us by
+Raffaelle.
+
+The moral nature had such empire over that frail physical nature that
+on the morrow Pierrette rose light and joyous as a lark, as radiant
+and as gay. Such a change could not escape the vigilant eye of her
+cousin Sylvie, who, this time, instead of scolding her, set about
+watching her with the scrutiny of a magpie. "What reason is there for
+such happiness?" was a thought of jealousy, not of tyranny. If the
+colonel had not been in Sylvie's mind she would have said to Pierrette
+as formerly, "Pierrette, you are very noise, and very regardless of
+what you have often been told." But now the old maid resolved to spy
+upon her as only old maids can spy. The day was still and gloomy, like
+the weather that precedes a storm.
+
+"You don't appear to be ill now, mademoiselle," said Sylvie at dinner.
+"Didn't I tell you she put it all on to annoy us?" she cried,
+addressing her brother, and not waiting for Pierrette's answer.
+
+"On the contrary, cousin, I have a sort of fever--"
+
+"Fever! what fever? You are as gay as a lark. Perhaps you have seen
+some one again?"
+
+Pierrette trembled and dropped her eyes on her plate.
+
+"Tartufe!" cried Sylvie; "and only fourteen years old! what a nature!
+Do you mean to come to a bad end?"
+
+"I don't know what you mean," said Pierrette, raising her sweet and
+luminous brown eyes to her cousin.
+
+"This evening," said Sylvie, "you are to stay in the dining-room with
+a candle, and do your sewing. You are not wanted in the salon; I
+sha'n't have you looking into my hand to help your favorites."
+
+Pierrette made no sign.
+
+"Artful creature!" cried Sylvie, leaving the room.
+
+Rogron, who did not understand his sister's anger, said to Pierrette:
+"What is all this about? Try to please your cousin, Pierrette; she is
+very indulgent to you, very gentle, and if you put her out of temper
+the fault is certainly yours. Why do you squabble so? For my part I
+like to live in peace. Look at Mademoiselle Bathilde and take pattern
+by her."
+
+Pierrette felt able to bear everything. Brigaut would come at midnight
+and bring her an answer, and that hope was the viaticum of her day.
+But she was using up her last strength. She did not go to bed, and
+stood waiting for the hour to strike. At last midnight sounded; softly
+she opened the window; this time she used a string made by tying bits
+of twine together. She heard Brigaut's step, and on drawing up the
+cord she found the following letter, which filled her with joy:--
+
+  My dear Pierrette,--As you are so ill you must not tire yourself
+  by waiting for me. You will hear me if I cry like an owl. Happily
+  my father taught me to imitate their note. So when you hear the
+  cry three times you will know I am there, and then you must let
+  down the cord. But I shall not come again for some days. I hope
+  then to bring you good news.
+
+  Oh! Pierrette, don't talk of dying! Pierrette, don't think such
+  things! All my heart shook, I felt as though I were dead myself at
+  the mere idea. No, my Pierrette, you must not die; you will live
+  happy, and soon you shall be delivered from your persecutors. If I
+  do not succeed in what I am undertaking for your rescue, I shall
+  appeal to the law, and I shall speak out before heaven and earth
+  and tell how your wicked relations are treating you. I am certain
+  that you have not many more days to suffer; have patience, my
+  Pierrette! Jacques is watching over you as in the old days when we
+  slid on the pond and I pulled you out of the hole in which we were
+  nearly drowned together.
+
+  Adieu, my dear Pierrette; in a few days, if God wills, we shall be
+  happy. Alas, I dare not tell you the only thing that may hinder
+  our meeting. But God loves us! In a few days I shall see my dear
+  Pierrette at liberty, without troubles, without any one to hinder
+  my looking at you--for, ah! Pierrette, I hunger to see you--
+  Pierrette, Pierrette, who deigns to love me and to tell me so.
+  Yes, Pierrette, I will be your lover when I have earned the
+  fortune you deserve; till then I will be to you only a devoted
+  servant whose life is yours to do what you please with it. Adieu.
+
+Jacques Brigaut.
+
+
+Here is a letter of which the major's son said nothing to Pierrette.
+He wrote it to Madame Lorrain at Nantes:--
+
+  Madame Lorrain,--Your granddaughter will die, worn-out with ill-
+  treatment, if you do not come to fetch her. I could scarcely
+  recognize her; and to show you the state of things I enclose a
+  letter I have received from Pierrette. You are thought here to
+  have taken the money of your granddaughter, and you ought to
+  justify yourself. If you can, come at once. We may still be happy;
+  but if delay Pierrette will be dead.
+
+  I am, with respect, your devoted servant,
+Jacques Brigaut.
+
+  At Monsieur Frappier's, Cabinet-maker, Grand'Rue, Provins.
+
+
+Brigaut's fear was that the grandmother was dead.
+
+Though this letter of the youth whom in her innocence she called her
+lover was almost enigmatical to Pierrette, she believed in it with all
+her virgin faith. Her heart was filled with that sensation which
+travellers in the desert feel when they see from afar the palm-trees
+round a well. In a few days her misery would end--Jacques said so. She
+relied on this promise of her childhood's friend; and yet, as she laid
+the letter beside the other, a dreadful thought came to her in
+foreboding words.
+
+"Poor Jacques," she said to herself, "he does not know the hole into
+which I have now fallen!"
+
+Sylvie had heard Pierrette, and she had also heard Brigaut under her
+window. She jumped out of bed and rushed to the window to look through
+the blinds into the square and there she saw, in the moonlight, a man
+hurrying in the direction of the colonel's house, in front of which
+Brigaut happened to stop. The old maid gently opened her door, went
+upstairs, was amazed to find a light in Pierrette's room, looked
+through the keyhole, and could see nothing.
+
+"Pierrette," she said, "are you ill?"
+
+"No, cousin," said Pierrette, surprised.
+
+"Why is your candle burning at this time of night? Open the door; I
+must know what this means."
+
+Pierrette went to the door bare-footed, and as soon as Sylvie entered
+the room she saw the cord, which Pierrette had forgotten to put away,
+not dreaming of a surprise. Sylvie jumped upon it.
+
+"What is that for?" she asked.
+
+"Nothing, cousin."
+
+"Nothing!" she cried. "Always lying; you'll never get to heaven that
+way. Go to bed; you'll take cold."
+
+She asked no more questions and went away, leaving Pierrette terrified
+by her unusual clemency. Instead of exploding with rage, Sylvie had
+suddenly determined to surprise Pierrette and the colonel together, to
+seize their letters and confound the two lovers who were deceiving
+her. Pierrette, inspired by a sense of danger, sewed the letters into
+her corset and covered them with calico.
+
+Here end the loves of Pierrette and Brigaut.
+
+Pierrette rejoiced in the thought that Jacques had determined to hold
+no communication with her for some days, because her cousin's
+suspicions would be quieted by finding nothing to feed them. Sylvie
+did in fact spend the next three nights on her legs, and each evening
+in watching the innocent colonel, without discovering either in him or
+in Pierrette, or in the house or out of it, anything that betrayed
+their understanding. She sent Pierrette to confession, and seized that
+moment to search the child's room, with the method and penetration of
+a spy or a custom-house officer. She found nothing. Her fury reached
+the apogee of human sentiments. If Pierrette had been there she would
+certainly have struck her remorselessly. To a woman of her temper,
+jealousy was less a sentiment than an occupation; she existed in it,
+it made her heart beat, she felt emotions hitherto completely unknown
+to her; the slightest sound or movement kept her on the qui vive; she
+watched Pierrette with gloomy intentness.
+
+"That miserable little wretch will kill me," she said.
+
+Sylvie's severity to her cousin reached the point of refined cruelty,
+and made the deplorable condition of the poor girl worse daily. She
+had fever regularly, and the pains in her head became intolerable. By
+the end of the week even the visitors at the house noticed her
+suffering face, which would have touched to pity all selfishness less
+cruel than theirs. It happened that Doctor Neraud, possibly by Vinet's
+advice, did not come to the house during that week. The colonel,
+knowing himself suspected by Sylvie, was afraid to risk his marriage
+by showing any solicitude for Pierrette. Bathilde explained the
+visible change in the girl by her natural growth. But at last, one
+Sunday evening, when Pierrette was in the salon, her sufferings
+overcame her and she fainted away. The colonel, who first saw her
+going, caught her in his arms and carried her to a sofa.
+
+"She did it on purpose," said Sylvie, looking at Mademoiselle Habert
+and the rest who were playing boston with her.
+
+"I assure you that your cousin is very ill," said the colonel.
+
+"She seemed well enough in your arms," Sylvie said to him in a low
+voice, with a savage smile.
+
+"The colonel is right," said Madame de Chargeboeuf. "You ought to send
+for a doctor. This morning at church every one was speaking, as they
+came out, of Mademoiselle Lorrain's appearance."
+
+"I am dying," said Pierrette.
+
+Desfondrilles called to Sylvie and told her to unfasten her cousin's
+gown. Sylvie went up to the girl, saying, "It is only a tantrum."
+
+She unfastened the gown and was about to touch the corset, when
+Pierrette, roused by the danger, sat up with superhuman strength,
+exclaiming, "No, no, I will go to bed."
+
+Sylvie had, however, touched the corset and felt the papers. She let
+Pierrette go, saying to the company:
+
+"What do you think now of her illness? I tell you it is all a
+pretence. You have no idea of the perversity of that child."
+
+After the card-playing was over she kept Vinet from following the
+other guests; she was furious and wanted vengeance, and was grossly
+rude to the colonel when he bade her good-night. Gouraud threw a look
+at the lawyer which threatened him to the depths of his being and
+seemed to put a ball in his entrails. Sylvie told Vinet to remain.
+When they were alone, she said,--
+
+"Never in my life, never in my born days, will I marry the colonel."
+
+"Now that you have come to that decision I may speak," said the
+lawyer. "The colonel is my friend, but I am more yours than his.
+Rogron has done me services which I can never forget. I am as strong a
+friend as I am an enemy. Once in the Chamber I shall rise to power,
+and I will make your brother a receiver-general. Now swear to me,
+before I say more, that you will never repeat what I tell you."
+(Sylvie made an affirmative sign.) "In the first place, the brave
+colonel is a gambler--"
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Sylvie.
+
+"If it had not been for the embarrassments this vice has brought upon
+him, he might have been a marshal of France," continued Vinet. "He is
+capable of running through your property; but he is very astute; you
+cannot be sure of not having children, and you told me yourself the
+risks you feared. No, if you want to marry, wait till I am in the
+Chamber and then take that old Desfondrilles, who shall be made chief
+justice. If you want revenge on the colonel make your brother marry
+Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf,--I can get her consent; she has two
+thousand francs a year, and you will be connected with the de
+Chargeboeufs as I am. Recollect what I tell you, the Chargeboeufs will
+be glad to claim us for cousins some day."
+
+"Gouraud loves Pierrette," was Sylvie's only answer.
+
+"He is quite capable of it," said Vinet, "and capable of marrying her
+after your death."
+
+"A fine calculation!" she said.
+
+"I tell you that man has the shrewdness of the devil. Marry your
+brother and announce that you mean to remain unmarried and will leave
+your property to your nephews and nieces. That will strike a blow at
+Gouraud and Pierrette both! and you'll see the faces they'll make."
+
+"Ah! that's true," cried the old maid, "I can serve them both right.
+She shall go to a shop, and get nothing from me. She hasn't a sou; let
+her do as we did,--work."
+
+Vinet departed, having put his plan into Sylvie's head, her dogged
+obstinacy being well-known to him. The old maid, he was certain, would
+think the scheme her own, and carry it out.
+
+The lawyer found the colonel in the square, smoking a cigar while he
+waited for him.
+
+"Halt!" said Gouraud; "you have pulled me down, but stones enough came
+with me to bury you--"
+
+"Colonel!--"
+
+"Colonel or not, I shall give you your deserts. In the first place,
+you shall not be deputy--"
+
+"Colonel!--"
+
+"I control ten votes and the election depends on--"
+
+"Colonel, listen to me. Is there no one to marry but that old Sylvie?
+I have just been defending you to her; you are accused and convicted
+of writing to Pierrette; she saw you leave your house at midnight and
+come to the girl's window--"
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!"
+
+"She means to marry her brother to Bathilde and leave her fortune to
+their children."
+
+"Rogron won't have any."
+
+"Yes he will," replied Vinet. "But I promise to find you some young
+and agreeable woman with a hundred and fifty thousand francs? Don't be
+a fool; how can you and I afford to quarrel? Things have gone against
+you in spite of all my care; but you don't understand me."
+
+"Then we must understand each other," said the colonel. "Get me a wife
+with a hundred and fifty thousand francs before the elections; if not
+--look out for yourself! I don't like unpleasant bed-fellows, and
+you've pulled the blankets all over to your side. Good-evening."
+
+"You shall see," said Vinet, grasping the colonel's hand
+affectionately.
+
+*****
+
+About one o'clock that night three clear, sharp cries of an owl,
+wonderfully well imitated, echoed through the square. Pierrette heard
+them in her feverish sleep; she jumped up, moist with perspiration,
+opened her window, saw Brigaut, and flung down a ball of silk, to
+which he fastened a letter. Sylvie, agitated by the events of the day
+and her own indecision of mind, was not asleep; she heard the owl.
+
+"Ah, bird of ill-omen!" she thought. "Why, Pierrette is getting up!
+What is she after?"
+
+Hearing the attic window open softly, Sylvie rushed to her own window
+and heard the rustle of paper against her blinds. She fastened the
+strings of her bed-gown and went quickly upstairs to Pierrette's room,
+where she found the poor girl unwinding the silk and freeing the
+letter.
+
+"Ha! I've caught you!" cried the old woman, rushing to the window,
+from which she saw Jacques running at full speed. "Give me that
+letter."
+
+"No, cousin," said Pierrette, who, by one of those strong inspirations
+of youth sustained by her own soul, rose to a grandeur of resistance
+such as we admire in the history of certain peoples reduced to
+despair.
+
+"Ha! you will not?" cried Sylvie, advancing upon the girl with a face
+full of hatred and fury.
+
+Pierrette fell back to get time to put her letter in her hand, which
+she clenched with unnatural force. Seeing this manoeuvre Sylvie
+grasped the delicate white hand of the girl in her lobster claws and
+tried to open it. It was a frightful struggle, an infamous struggle;
+it was more than a physical struggle; it assailed the mind, the sole
+treasure of the human being, the thought, which God has placed beyond
+all earthly power and guards as the secret way between the sufferer
+and Himself. The two women, one dying, the other in the vigor of
+health, looked at each other fixedly. Pierrette's eyes darted on her
+executioner the look the famous Templar on the rack cast upon Philippe
+le Bel, who could not bear it and fled thunderstricken. Sylvie, a
+woman and a jealous woman, answered that magnetic look with malignant
+flashes. A dreadful silence reigned. The clenched hand of the Breton
+girl resisted her cousin's efforts like a block of steel. Sylvie
+twisted Pierrette's arm, she tried to force the fingers open; unable
+to do so she stuck her nails into the flesh. At last, in her madness,
+she set her teeth into the wrist, trying to conquer the girl by pain.
+Pierrette defied her still, with that same terrible glance of
+innocence. The anger of the old maid grew to such a pitch that it
+became blind fury. She seized Pierrette's arm and struck the closed
+fist upon the window-sill, and then upon the marble of the
+mantelpiece, as we crack a nut to get the kernel.
+
+"Help! help!" cried Pierrette, "they are murdering me!"
+
+"Ha! you may well scream, when I catch you with a lover in the dead of
+night."
+
+And she beat the hand pitilessly.
+
+"Help! help!" cried Pierrette, the blood flowing.
+
+At that instant, loud knocks were heard at the front door. Exhausted,
+the two women paused a moment.
+
+Rogron, awakened and uneasy, not knowing what was happening, had got
+up, gone to his sister's room, and not finding her was frightened.
+Hearing the knocks he went down, unfastened the front door, and was
+nearly knocked over by Brigaut, followed by a sort of phantom.
+
+At this moment Sylvie's eyes chanced to fall on Pierrette's corset,
+and she remembered the papers. Releasing the girl's wrist she sprang
+upon the corset like a tiger on its prey, and showed it to Pierrette
+with a smile,--the smile of an Iroquois over his victim before he
+scalps him.
+
+"I am dying," said Pierrette, falling on her knees, "oh, who will save
+me?"
+
+"I!" said a woman with white hair and an aged parchment face, in which
+two gray eyes glittered.
+
+"Ah! grandmother, you have come too late," cried the poor child,
+bursting into tears.
+
+Pierrette fell upon her bed, her strength all gone, half-dead with the
+exhaustion which, in her feeble state, followed so violent a struggle.
+The tall gray woman took her in her arms, as a nurse lifts a child,
+and went out, followed by Brigaut, without a word to Sylvie, on whom
+she cast one glance of majestic accusation.
+
+The apparition of that august old woman, in her Breton costume,
+shrouded in her coif (a sort of hooded mantle of black cloth),
+accompanied by Brigaut, appalled Sylvie; she fancied she saw death.
+She slowly went down the stairs, listened to the front door closing
+behind them, and came face to face with her brother, who exclaimed:
+"Then they haven't killed you?"
+
+"Go to bed," said Sylvie. "To-morrow we will see what we must do."
+
+She went back to her own bed, ripped open the corset, and read
+Brigaut's two letters, which confounded her. She went to sleep in the
+greatest perplexity,--not imagining the terrible results to which her
+conduct was to lead.
+
+*****
+
+The letters sent by Brigaut to old Madame Lorrain reached her in a
+moment of ineffable joy, which the perusal of them troubled. The poor
+old woman had grieved deeply in living without her Pierrette beside
+her, but she had consoled her loneliness with the thought that the
+sacrifice of herself was in the interests of her grandchild. She was
+blessed with one of those ever-young hearts which are upheld and
+invigorated by the idea of sacrifice. Her old husband, whose only joy
+was his little granddaughter, had grieved for Pierrette; every day he
+had seemed to look for her. It was an old man's grief,--on which such
+old men live, of which they die.
+
+Every one can now imagine the happiness which this poor old woman,
+living in a sort of almshouse, felt when she learned of a generous
+action, rare indeed but not impossible in France. The head of the
+house of Collinet, whose failure in 1814 had caused the Lorrains a
+loss of twenty-four thousand francs, had gone to America with his
+children after his disasters. He had too high a courage to remain a
+ruined man. After eleven years of untold effort crowned by success he
+returned to Nantes to recover his position, leaving his eldest son in
+charge of his transatlantic house. He found Madame Lorrain of Pen-Hoel
+in the institution of Saint-Jacques, and was witness of the
+resignation with which this most unfortunate of his creditors bore her
+misery.
+
+"God forgive you!" said the old woman, "since you give me on the
+borders of my grave the means of securing the happiness of my dear
+granddaughter; but alas! it will not clear the debts of my poor
+husband!"
+
+Monsieur Collinet made over to the widow both the capital and the
+accrued interest, amounting to about forty-two thousand francs. His
+other creditors, prosperous, rich, and intelligent merchants, had
+easily born their losses, whereas the misfortunes of the Lorrains
+seemed so irremediable to old Monsieur Collinet that he promised the
+widow to pay off her husband's debts, to the amount of forty thousand
+francs more. When the Bourse of Nantes heard of this generous
+reparation they wished to receive Collinet to their board before his
+certificates were granted by the Royal court at Rennes; but the
+merchant refused the honor, preferring to submit to the ordinary
+commercial rule.
+
+Madame Lorrain had received the money only the day before the post
+brought her Brigaut's letter, enclosing that of Pierrette. Her first
+thought had been, as she signed the receipt: "Now I can live with my
+Pierrette and marry her to that good Brigaut, who will make a fortune
+with my money."
+
+Therefore the moment she had read the fatal letters she made instant
+preparations to start for Provins. She left Nantes that night by the
+mail; for some one had explained to her its celerity. In Paris she
+took the diligence for Troyes, which passes through Provins, and by
+half-past eleven at night she reached Frappier's, where Brigaut,
+shocked at her despairing looks, told her of Pierrette's state and
+promised to bring the poor girl to her instantly. His words so
+terrified the grandmother that she could not control her impatience
+and followed him to the square. When Pierrette screamed, the horror of
+that cry went to her heart as sharply as it did to Brigaut's. Together
+they would have roused the neighborhood if Rogron, in his terror, had
+not opened the door. The scream of the young girl at bay gave her
+grandmother the sudden strength of anger with which she carried her
+dear Pierrette in her arms to Frappier's house, where Madame Frappier
+hastily arranged Brigaut's own room for the old woman and her
+treasure. In that poor room, on a bed half-made, the sufferer was
+deposited; and there she fainted away, holding her hand still
+clenched, wounded, bleeding, with the nails deep bedded in the flesh.
+Brigaut, Frappier, his wife, and the old woman stood looking at
+Pierrette in silence, all four of them in a state of indescribable
+amazement.
+
+"Why is her hand bloody?" said the grandmother at last.
+
+Pierrette, overcome by the sleep which follows all abnormal displays
+of strength, and dimly conscious that she was safe from violence,
+gradually unbent her fingers. Brigaut's letter fell from them like an
+answer.
+
+"They tried to take my letter from her," said Brigaut, falling on his
+knees and picking up the lines in which he had told his little friend
+to come instantly and softly away from the house. He kissed with pious
+love the martyr's hand.
+
+It was a sight that made those present tremble when they saw the old
+gray woman, a sublime spectre, standing beside her grandchild's
+pillow. Terror and vengeance wrote their fierce expressions in the
+wrinkles that lined her skin of yellow ivory; her forehead, half
+hidden by the straggling meshes of her gray hair, expressed a solemn
+anger. She read, with a power of intuition given to the aged when near
+their grave, Pierrette's whole life, on which her mind had dwelt
+throughout her journey. She divined the illness of her darling, and
+knew that she was threatened with death. Two big tears painfully rose
+in her wan gray eyes, from which her troubles had worn both lashes and
+eyebrows, two pearls of anguish, forming within them and giving them a
+dreadful brightness; then each tear swelled and rolled down the
+withered cheek, but did not wet it.
+
+"They have killed her!" she said at last, clasping her hands.
+
+She fell on her knees which struck sharp blows on the brick-laid
+floor, making a vow no doubt to Saint Anne d'Auray, the most powerful
+of the madonnas of Brittany.
+
+"A doctor from Paris," she said to Brigaut. "Go and fetch one,
+Brigaut, go!"
+
+She took him by the shoulder and gave him a despotic push to send him
+from the room.
+
+"I was coming, my lad, when you wrote me; I am rich,--here, take
+this," she cried, recalling him, and unfastening as she spoke the
+strings that tied her short-gown. Then she drew a paper from her bosom
+in which were forty-two bank-bills, saying, "Take what is necessary,
+and bring back the greatest doctor in Paris."
+
+"Keep those," said Frappier; "he can't change thousand franc notes
+now. I have money, and the diligence will be passing presently; he can
+certainly find a place on it. But before he goes we had better consult
+Doctor Martener; he will tell us the best physician in Paris. The
+diligence won't pass for over an hour,--we have time enough."
+
+Brigaut woke up Monsieur Martener, and brought him at once. The doctor
+was not a little surprised to find Mademoiselle Lorrain at Frappier's.
+Brigaut told him of the scene that had just taken place at the
+Rogrons'; but even so the doctor did not at first suspect the horror
+of it, nor the extent of the injury done. Martener gave the address of
+the celebrated Horace Bianchon, and Brigaut started for Paris by the
+diligence. Monsieur Martener then sat down and examined first the
+bruised and bloody hand which lay outside the bed.
+
+"She could not have given these wounds herself," he said.
+
+"No; the horrible woman to whom I had the misfortune to trust her was
+murdering her," said the grandmother. "My poor Pierrette was screaming
+'Help! help! I'm dying,'--enough to touch the heart of an
+executioner."
+
+"But why was it?" said the doctor, feeling Pierrette's pulse. "She is
+very ill," he added, examining her with a light. "She must have
+suffered terribly; I don't understand why she has not been properly
+cared for."
+
+"I shall complain to the authorities," said the grandmother. "Those
+Rogrons asked me for my child in a letter, saying they had twelve
+thousand francs a year and would take care of her; had they the right
+to make her their servant and force her to do work for which she had
+not the strength?"
+
+"They did not choose to see the most visible of all maladies to which
+young girls are liable. She needed the utmost care," cried Monsieur
+Martener.
+
+Pierrette was awakened by the light which Madame Frappier was holding
+near her face, and by the horrible sufferings in her head caused by
+the reaction of her struggle.
+
+"Ah! Monsieur Martener, I am very ill," she said in her pretty voice.
+
+"Where is the pain, my little friend?" asked the doctor.
+
+"Here," she said, touching her head above the left ear.
+
+"There's an abscess," said the doctor, after feeling the head for a
+long time and questioning Pierrette on her sufferings. "You must tell
+us all, my child, so that we may know how to cure you. Why is your
+hand like this? You could not have given yourself that wound."
+
+Pierrette related the struggle between herself and her cousin Sylvie.
+
+"Make her talk," said the doctor to the grandmother, "and find out the
+whole truth. I will await the arrival of the doctor from Paris; and we
+will send for the surgeon in charge of the hospital here, and have a
+consultation. The case seems to me a very serious one. Meantime I will
+send you a quieting draught so that mademoiselle may sleep; she needs
+sleep."
+
+Left alone with her granddaughter the old Breton woman exerted her
+influence over the child and made her tell all; she let her know that
+she had money enough now for all three, and promised that Brigaut
+should live with them. The poor girl admitted her martyrdom, not
+imagining the events to which her admissions would give rise. The
+monstrosity of two beings without affection and without conception of
+family life opened to the old woman a world of woe as far from her
+knowledge as the morals of savages may have seemed to the first
+discoverers who set foot in America.
+
+The arrival of her grandmother, the certainty of living with her in
+comfort soothed Pierrette's mind as the sleeping draught soothed her
+body. The old woman watched her darling, kissing her forehead, hair,
+and hands, as the holy women of old kissed the hands of Jesus when
+they laid him in the tomb.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE FAMILY COUNCIL
+
+At nine o'clock that morning Monsieur Martener went to see Monsieur
+Tiphaine, and related to him the scene between Pierrette and Sylvie,
+and the tortures of all kinds, moral and physical, to which the
+Rogrons had subjected their cousin, and the two alarming forms of
+illness which their cruelty had developed. Monsieur Tiphaine sent for
+Auffray the notary, one of Pierrette's own relations on the maternal
+side.
+
+At this particular time the war between the Vinet party and the
+Tiphaine party was at its height. The scandals which the Rogrons and
+their adherents were disseminating through the town about the liaison
+of Madame Tiphaine's mother with the banker du Tillet, and the
+bankruptcy of her father (a forger, they said), were all the more
+exasperating to the Tiphaines because these things were malicious
+truths, not libels. Such wounds cut deep; they go to the quick of
+feelings and of interests. These speeches, repeated to the partisans
+of the Tiphaines by the same mouths which told the Rogrons of the
+sneers of "those women" of the Tiphaine clique, fed the hatreds of
+both sides, now increased by the political element. The animosities
+caused at this time in France by the spirit of party, the violences of
+which were excessive, were everywhere mixed up, as in Provins, with
+selfish schemes and wounded or vindictive individual interests. Each
+party eagerly seized on whatever might injure the rival party.
+Personal hatreds and self-love mingled as much as political animosity
+in even the smallest matters, and were carried to hitherto unheard-of
+lengths. A whole town would be roused to excitement over some private
+struggle, until it took the character of a political debate.
+
+Monsieur Tiphaine at once perceived in the case of Pierrette against
+the Rogrons a means of humbling, mortifying, and dishonoring the
+masters of that salon where plans against the monarchy were made and
+an opposition journal born. The public prosecutor was called in; and
+together with Monsieur Auffray the notary, Pierrette's relation, and
+Monsieur Martener, a cautious consultation was held in the utmost
+secrecy as to the proper course to follow. Monsieur Martener agreed to
+advise Pierrette's grandmother to apply to the courts to have Auffray
+appointed guardian to his young relation. The guardian could then
+convene a "Family Council," and, backed by the testimony of three
+doctors, demand the girl's release from the authority of the Rogrons.
+The affair thus managed would have to go before the courts, and the
+public prosecutor, Monsieur Lesourd, would see that it was taken to a
+criminal court by demanding an inquiry.
+
+Towards midday all Provins was roused by the strange news of what had
+happened during the night at the Rogrons'. Pierrette's cries had been
+faintly heard, though they were soon over. No one had risen to inquire
+what they meant, but every one said the next day, "Did you hear those
+screams about one in the morning?" Gossip and comments soon magnified
+the horrible drama, and a crowd collected in front of Frappier's shop,
+asking the worthy cabinet-maker for information, and hearing from him
+how Pierrette was brought to his house with her fingers broken and the
+hand bloody.
+
+Towards one in the afternoon the post-chaise of Doctor Bianchon, who
+was accompanied by Brigaut, stopped before the house, and Madame
+Frappier went at once to summon Monsieur Martener and the surgeon in
+charge of the hospital. Thus the gossip of the town received
+confirmation. The Rogrons were declared to have ill-used their cousin
+deliberately, and to have come near killing her. Vinet heard the news
+while attending to his business in the law courts; he left everything
+and hurried to the Rogrons. Rogron and his sister had just finished
+breakfast. Sylvie was reluctant to tell her brother of her
+discomfiture of the night before; but he pressed her with questions,
+to which she would make no answer than, "That's not your business."
+She went and came from the kitchen to the dining-room on pretence of
+preparing the breakfast, but chiefly to avoid discussion. She was
+alone when Vinet entered.
+
+"You know what's happened?" said the lawyer.
+
+"No," said Sylvie.
+
+"You will be arrested on a criminal charge," replied Vinet, "from the
+way things are now going about Pierrette."
+
+"A criminal charge!" cried Rogron, who had come into the room. "Why?
+What for?"
+
+"First of all," said the lawyer, looking at Sylvie, "explain to me
+without concealment and as if you stood before God, what happened in
+this house last night--they talk of amputating Pierrette's hand."
+
+Sylvie turned livid and shuddered.
+
+"Then there is some truth in it?" said Vinet.
+
+Mademoiselle Rogron related the scene, trying to excuse herself; but,
+prodded with questions, she acknowledged the facts of the horrible
+struggle.
+
+"If you have only injured her fingers you will be taken before the
+police court for a misdemeanor; but if they cut off her hand you may
+be tried at the Assizes for a worse offence. The Tiphaines will do
+their best to get you there."
+
+Sylvie, more dead than alive, confessed her jealousy, and, what was
+harder to do, confessed also that her suspicions were unfounded.
+
+"Heavens, what a case this will make!" cried the lawyer. "You and your
+brother may be ruined by it; you will be abandoned by most people
+whether you win or lose. If you lose, you will have to leave Provins."
+
+"Oh, my dear Monsieur Vinet, you who are such a great lawyer," said
+Rogron, terrified, "advise us! save us!"
+
+The crafty Vinet worked the terror of the two imbeciles to its utmost,
+declaring that Madame and Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf might be
+unwilling to enter their house again. To be abandoned by women of
+their rank would be a terrible condemnation. At length, after an hour
+of adroit manoeuvring, it was agreed that Vinet must have some
+powerful motive in taking the case, that would impress the minds of
+all Provins and explain his efforts on behalf of the Rogrons. This
+motive they determined should be Rogron's marriage to Mademoiselle de
+Chargeboeuf; it should be announced that very day and the banns
+published on Sunday. The contract could be drawn immediately.
+Mademoiselle Rogron agreed, in consideration of the marriage, to
+appear in the contract as settling her capital on her brother,
+retaining only the income of it. Vinet made Rogron and his sister
+comprehend the necessity of antedating the document by two or three
+days, so as to commit the mother and daughter in the eyes of the
+public and give them a reason for continuing their visits.
+
+"Sign that contract and I'll take upon myself to get you safely out of
+this affair," said the lawyer. "There will be a terrible fight; but I
+will put my whole soul into it--you'll have to make me a votive
+offering."
+
+"Oh, yes, yes," said Rogron.
+
+By half-past eleven the lawyer had plenary powers to draw the contract
+and conduct the defence of the Rogrons. At twelve o'clock application
+was made to Monsieur Tiphaine, as a judge sitting in chambers, against
+Brigaut and the widow Lorrain for having abducted Pierrette Lorrain, a
+minor, from the house of her legal guardian. In this way the bold
+lawyer became the aggressor and made Rogron the injured party. He
+spoke of the matter from this point of view in the court-house.
+
+The judge postponed the hearing till four o'clock. Needless to
+describe the excitement in the town. Monsieur Tiphaine knew that by
+three o'clock the consultation of doctors would be over and their
+report drawn up; he wished Auffray, as surrogate-guardian, to be at
+the hearing armed with that report.
+
+The announcement of Rogron's marriage and the sacrifices made to it by
+Sylvie in the contract alienated two important supporters from the
+brother and sister, namely,--Mademoiselle Habert and the colonel,
+whose hopes were thus annihilated. They remained, however, ostensibly
+on the Rogron side for the purpose of injuring it. Consequently, as
+soon as Monsieur Martener mentioned the alarming condition of
+Pierrette's head, Celeste and the colonel told of the blow she had
+given herself during the evening when Sylvie had forced her to leave
+the salon; and they related the old maid's barbarous and unfeeling
+comments, with other statements proving her cruelty to her suffering
+cousin. Vinet had foreseen this storm; but he had secured the entire
+fortune of the Rogrons for Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf, and he
+promised himself that in a few weeks she should be mistress of the
+Rogron house, and reign with him over Provins, and even bring about a
+fusion with the Breauteys and the aristocrats in the interests of his
+ambition.
+
+From midday to four o'clock all the ladies of the Tiphaine clique sent
+to inquire after Mademoiselle Lorrain. She, poor girl, was wholly
+ignorant of the commotion she was causing in the little town. In the
+midst of her sufferings she was ineffably happy in recovering her
+grandmother and Brigaut, the two objects of her affection. Brigaut's
+eyes were constantly full of tears. The old grandmother sat by the bed
+and caressed her darling. To the three doctors she told every detail
+she had obtained from Pierrette as to her life in the Rogron house.
+Horace Bianchon expressed his indignation in vehement language.
+Shocked at such barbarity he insisted on all the physicians in the
+town being called in to see the case; the consequence was that Dr.
+Neraud, the friend of the Rogrons, was present. The report was
+unanimously signed. It is useless to give a text of it here. If
+Moliere's medical terms were barbarous, those of modern science have
+the advantage of being so clear that the explanation of Pierrette's
+malady, though natural and unfortunately common, horrified all ears.
+
+At four o'clock, after the usual rising of the court, president
+Tiphaine again took his seat, when Madame Lorrain, accompanied by
+Monsieur Auffray and Brigaut and a crowd of interested persons,
+entered the court-room. Vinet was alone. This contrast struck the
+minds of those present. The lawyer, who still wore his robe, turned
+his cold face to the judge, settled his spectacles on his pallid green
+eyes, and then in a shrill, persistent voice he stated that two
+strangers had forced themselves at night into the Rogron domicile and
+had abducted therefrom the minor Lorrain. The legal rights were with
+the guardian, who now demanded the restoration of his ward.
+
+Monsieur Auffray rose, as surrogate-guardian, and requested to be
+heard.
+
+"If the judge," he said, "will admit the report, which I hold in my
+hand, signed by one of the most famous physicians in Paris, and by all
+the physicians in Provins, he will understand not only that the demand
+of the Sieur Rogron is senseless, but also that the grandmother of the
+minor had grave cause to instantly remove her from her persecutors.
+Here are the facts. The report of these physicians attribute the
+almost dying condition of the said minor to the ill-treatment she has
+received from the Sieur Rogron and his sister. We shall, as the law
+directs, convoke a Family Council with the least possible delay, and
+discuss the question as to whether or not the guardian should be
+deposed. And we now ask that the minor be not returned to the domicile
+of the said guardian but that she be confided to some member of her
+family who shall be designated by the judge."
+
+Vinet replied, declaring that the physicians' report ought to have
+been submitted to him in order that he might have disproved it.
+
+"Not submitted to your side," said the judge, severely, "but possibly
+to the /procureur du roi/. The case is heard."
+
+The judge then wrote at the bottom of the petition the following
+order:--
+
+  "Whereas it appears, from a deliberate and unanimous report of all
+  the physicians of this town, together with Doctor Bianchon of the
+  medical faculty of Paris, that the minor Lorrain, claimed by
+  Jerome-Denis Rogron, her guardian, is extremely ill in consequence
+  of ill-treatment and personal assault in the house of the said
+  guardian and his sister:
+
+  "We, president of the court of Provins, passing upon the said
+  petition, order that until the Family Council is held the minor
+  Lorrain is not to be returned to the household of her said
+  guardian, but shall be kept in that of her surrogate-guardian.
+
+  "And further, considering the state in which the said minor now
+  is, and the traces of violence which, according to the report of
+  the physicians, are now upon her person, we commission the
+  attending physician and the surgeon in charge of the hospital of
+  Provins to visit her, and in case the injuries from the said
+  assault become alarming, the matter will be held to await the
+  action of the criminal courts; and this without prejudice to the
+  civil suit undertaken by Auffray the surrogate-guardian."
+
+This severe judgment was read out by President Tiphaine in a loud and
+distinct voice.
+
+"Why not send them to the galleys at once?" said Vinet. "And all this
+fuss about a girl who was carrying on an intrigue with an apprentice
+to a cabinet-maker! If the case goes on in this way," he cried,
+insolently, "we shall demand other judges on the ground of legitimate
+suspicion."
+
+Vinet left the court-room, and went among the chief men of his party
+to explain Rogron's position, declaring that he had never so much as
+given a flip to his cousin, and that the judge had viewed him much
+less as Pierrette's guardian than as a leading elector in Provins.
+
+To hear Vinet, people might have supposed that the Tiphaines were
+making a great fuss about nothing; the mounting was bringing forth a
+mouse. Sylvie, an eminently virtuous and pious woman, had discovered
+an intrigue between her brother's ward and a workman, a Breton named
+Brigaut. The scoundrel knew very well that the girl would have her
+grandmother's money, and he wished to seduce her (Vinet to talk of
+that!). Mademoiselle Rogron, who had discovered letters proving the
+depravity of the girl, was not as much to blame as the Tiphaines were
+trying to make out. If she did use some violence to get possession of
+those letters (which was no wonder, when we consider what Breton
+obstinacy is), how could Rogron be considered responsible for all
+that?
+
+The lawyer went on to make the matter a partisan affair, and to give
+it a political color.
+
+"They who listen to only one bell hear only one sound," said the wise
+men. "Have you heard what Vinet says? Vinet explains things clearly."
+
+Frappier's house being thought injurious to Pierrette, owing to the
+noise in the street which increased the sufferings in her head, she
+was taken to that of her surrogate guardian, the change being as
+necessary medically as it was judicially. The removal was made with
+the utmost caution, and was calculated to produce a great public
+effect. Pierrette was laid on a mattress and carried on a stretcher by
+two men; a Gray Sister walked beside her with a bottle of sal volatile
+in her hand, while the grandmother, Brigaut, Madame Auffray, and her
+maid followed. People were at their windows and doors to see the
+procession pass. Certainly the state in which they saw Pierrette, pale
+as death, gave immense advantage to the party against the Rogrons. The
+Auffrays were determined to prove to the whole town that the judge was
+right in the decision he had given. Pierrette and her grandmother were
+installed on the second floor of Monsieur Auffray's house. The notary
+and his wife gave her every care with the greatest hospitality, which
+was not without a little ostentation in it. Pierrette had her
+grandmother to nurse her; and Monsieur Martener and the head-surgeon
+of the hospital attended her.
+
+On the evening of this day exaggerations began on both sides. The
+Rogron salon was crowded. Vinet had stirred up the whole Liberal party
+on the subject. The Chargeboeuf ladies dined with the Rogrons, for the
+contract was to be signed that evening. Vinet had had the banns posted
+at the mayor's office in the afternoon. He made light of the Pierrette
+affair. If the Provins court was prejudiced, the Royal courts would
+appreciate the facts, he said, and the Auffrays would think twice
+before they flung themselves into such a suit. The alliance of the
+Rogrons with the Chargeboeufs was an immense consideration in the
+minds of a certain class of people. To them it made the Rogrons as
+white as snow and Pierrette an evilly disposed little girl, a serpent
+warmed in their bosom.
+
+In Madame Tiphaine's salon vengeance was had for all the mischievous
+scandals that the Vinet party had disseminated for the past two years.
+The Rogrons were monsters, and the guardian should undergo a criminal
+trial. In the Lower town, Pierrette was quite well; in the Upper town
+she was dying; at the Rogrons' she scratched her wrist; at Madame
+Tiphaine's her fingers were fractured and one was to be cut off. The
+next day the "Courrier de Provins," had a plausible article, extremely
+well-written, a masterpiece of insinuations mixed with legal points,
+which showed that there was no case whatever against Rogron. The "Bee-
+hive," which did not appear till two days later, could not answer
+without becoming defamatory; it replied, however, that in an affair
+like this it was best to wait until the law took its course.
+
+The Family Council was selected by the /juge de paix/ of the canton of
+Provins, and consisted of Rogron and the two Messieurs Auffray, the
+nearest relatives, and Monsieur Ciprey, nephew of Pierrette's maternal
+grandmother. To these were joined Monsieur Habert, Pierrette's
+confessor, and Colonel Gouraud, who had always professed himself a
+comrade and friend of her father, Colonel Lorrain. The impartiality of
+the judge in these selections was much applauded,--Monsieur Habert and
+Colonel Gouraud being considered the firm friends of the Rogrons.
+
+The serious situation in which Rogron found himself made him ask for
+the assistance of a lawyer (and he named Vinet) at the Family Council.
+By this manoeuvre, evidently advised by Vinet himself, Rogron
+succeeded in postponing the meeting of the council till the end of
+December. At that time Monsieur Tiphaine and his wife would be settled
+in Paris for the opening of the Chambers; and the ministerial party
+would be left without its head. Vinet had already worked upon
+Desfondrilles, the deputy-judge, in case the matter should go, after
+the hearing before the council, to the criminal courts.
+
+Vinet spoke for three hours before the Family Council; he proved the
+existence of an intrigue between Pierrette and Brigaut, which
+justified all Mademoiselle Rogron's severity. He showed how natural it
+was that the guardian should have left the management of his ward to a
+woman; he dwelt on the fact that Rogron had not interfered with
+Pierrette's education as planned by his sister Sylvie. But in spite of
+Vinet's efforts the Council were unanimous in removing Rogron from the
+guardianship. Monsieur Auffray was appointed in his place, and
+Monsieur Ciprey was made surrogate. The Council summoned before it and
+examined Adele, the servant-woman, who testified against her late
+masters; also Mademoiselle Habert, who related the cruel remarks made
+by Mademoiselle Rogron on the evening when Pierrette had given herself
+a frightful blow, heard by all the company, and the speech of Madame
+de Chargeboeuf about the girl's health. Brigaut produced the letter he
+had received from Pierrette, which proved their innocence and stated
+her ill-treatment. Proof was given that the condition of the minor was
+the result of neglect on the part of the guardian, who was responsible
+for all that concerned his ward. Pierrette's illness had been apparent
+to every one, even to persons in the town who were strangers to the
+family, yet the guardian had done nothing for her. The charge of ill-
+treatment was therefore sustained against Rogron; and the case would
+now go before the public.
+
+Rogron, advised by Vinet, opposed the acceptance of the report of the
+Council by the court. The authorities then intervened in consequence
+of Pierrette's state, which was daily growing worse. The trial of the
+case, though placed at once upon the docket, was postponed until the
+month of March, 1828, to wait events.
+
+
+
+X
+
+VERDICTS--LEGAL AND OTHER
+
+Meantime Rogron's marriage with Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf took
+place. Sylvie moved to the second floor of the house, which she shared
+with Madame de Chargeboeuf, for the first floor was entirely taken up
+by the new wife. The beautiful Madame Rogron succeeded to the social
+place of the beautiful Madame Tiphaine. The influence of the marriage
+was immense. No one now came to visit Sylvie, but Madame Rogron's
+salon was always full.
+
+Sustained by the influence of his mother-in-law and the bankers du
+Tillet and Nucingen, Monsieur Tiphaine was fortunate enough to do some
+service to the administration; he became one of its chief orators, was
+made judge in the civil courts, and obtained the appointment of his
+nephew Lesourd to his own vacant place as president of the court of
+Provins. This appointment greatly annoyed Desfondrilles. The Keeper of
+the Seals sent down one of his own proteges to fill Lesourd's place.
+The promotion of Monsieur Tiphaine and his translation to Paris were
+therefore of no benefit at all to the Vinet party; but Vinet
+nevertheless made a clever use of the result. He had always told the
+Provins people that they were being used as a stepping-stone to raise
+the crafty Madame Tiphaine into grandeur; Tiphaine himself had tricked
+them; Madame Tiphaine despised both Provins and its people in her
+heart, and would never return there again. Just at this crisis
+Monsieur Tiphaine's father died; his son inherited a fine estate and
+sold his house in Provins to Monsieur Julliard. The sale proved to the
+minds of all how little the Tiphaines thought of Provins. Vinet was
+right; Vinet had been a true prophet. These things had great influence
+on the question of Pierrette's guardianship.
+
+Thus the dreadful martyrdom brutally inflicted on the poor child by
+two imbecile tyrants (which led, through its consequences, to the
+terrible operation of trepanning, performed by Monsieur Martener under
+the advice of Doctor Bianchon),--all this horrible drama reduced to
+judicial form was left to float in the vile mess called in legal
+parlance the calendar. The case was made to drag through the delays
+and the interminable labyrinths of the law, by the shufflings of an
+unprincipled lawyer; and during all this time the calumniated girl
+languished in the agony of the worst pain known to science.
+
+Monsieur Martener, together with the Auffray family, were soon charmed
+by the beauty of Pierrette's nature and the character of her old
+grandmother, whose feelings, ideas, and ways bore the stamp of Roman
+antiquity,--this matron of the Marais was like a woman in Plutarch.
+
+Doctor Martener struggled bravely with death, which already grasped
+its prey. From the first, Bianchon and the hospital surgeon had
+considered Pierrette doomed; and there now took place between the
+doctor and the disease, the former relying on Pierrette's youth, one
+of those struggles which physicians alone comprehend,--the reward of
+which, in case of success, is never found in the venal pay nor in the
+patients themselves, but in the gentle satisfaction of conscience, in
+the invisible ideal palm gathered by true artists from the contentment
+which fills their soul after accomplishing a noble work. The physician
+strains towards good as an artist towards beauty, each impelled by
+that grand sentiment which we call virtue. This daily contest wiped
+out of Doctor Martener's mind the petty irritations of that other
+contest of the Tiphaines and the Vinets,--as always happens to men
+when they find themselves face to face with a great and real misery to
+conquer.
+
+Monsieur Martener had begun his career in Paris; but the cruel
+activity of the city and its insensibility to its masses of suffering
+had shocked his gentle soul, fitted only for the quiet life of the
+provinces. Moreover, he was under the yoke of his beautiful native
+land. He returned to Provins, where he married and settled, and cared
+almost lovingly for the people, who were to him like a large family.
+During the whole of Pierrette's illness he was careful not to speak of
+her. His reluctance to answer the questions of those who asked about
+her was so evident that persons soon ceased to put them. Pierrette was
+to him, what indeed she truly was, a poem, mysterious, profound, vast
+in suffering, such as doctors find at times in their terrible
+experience. He felt an admiration for this delicate young creature
+which he would not share with any one.
+
+This feeling of the physician for his patient was, however,
+unconsciously communicated (like all true feelings) to Monsieur and
+Madame Auffray, whose house became, so long as Pierrette was in it,
+quiet and silent. The children, who had formerly played so joyously
+with her, agreed among themselves with the loving grace of childhood
+to be neither noisy nor troublesome. They made it a point of honor to
+be good because Pierrette was ill. Monsieur Auffray's house was in the
+Upper town, beneath the ruins of the Chateau, and it was built upon a
+sort of terrace formed by the overthrow of the old ramparts. The
+occupants could have a view of the valley from the little fruit-garden
+enclosed by walls which overlooked the town. The roofs of the other
+houses came to about the level of the lower wall of this garden. Along
+the terrace ran a path, by which Monsieur Auffray's study could be
+entered through a glass door; at the other end of the path was an
+arbor of grape vines and a fig-tree, beneath which stood a round
+table, a bench and some chairs, painted green. Pierrette's bedroom was
+above the study of her new guardian. Madame Lorrain slept in a cot
+beside her grandchild. From her window Pierrette could see the whole
+of the glorious valley of Provins, which she hardly knew, so seldom
+had she left that dreadful house of the Rogrons. When the weather was
+fine she loved to drag herself, resting on her grandmother's arm, to
+the vine-clad arbor. Brigaut, unable to work, came three times a day
+to see his little friend; he was gnawed by a grief which made him
+indifferent to life. He lay in wait like a dog for Monsieur Martener,
+and followed him when he left the house. The old grandmother, drunk
+with grief, had the courage to conceal her despair; she showed her
+darling the smiling face she formerly wore at Pen-Hoel. In her desire
+to produce that illusion in the girl's mind, she made her a little
+Breton cap like the one Pierrette had worn on her first arrival in
+Provins; it made the darling seem more like her childlike self; in it
+she was delightful to look upon, her sweet face circled with a halo of
+cambric and fluted lace. Her skin, white with the whiteness of
+unglazed porcelain, her forehead, where suffering had printed the
+semblance of deep thought, the purity of the lines refined by illness,
+the slowness of the glances, and the occasional fixity of the eyes,
+made Pierrette an almost perfect embodiment of melancholy. She was
+served by all with a sort of fanaticism; she was felt to be so gentle,
+so tender, so loving. Madame Martener sent her piano to her sister
+Madame Auffray, thinking to amuse Pierrette who was passionately fond
+of music. It was a poem to watch her listening to a theme of Weber, or
+Beethoven, or Herold,--her eyes raised, her lips silent, regretting no
+doubt the life escaping her. The cure Peroux and Monsieur Habert, her
+two religious comforters, admired her saintly resignation. Surely the
+seraphic perfection of young girls and young men marked with the
+hectic of death, is a wonderful fact worthy of the attention alike of
+philosophers and of heedless minds. He who has ever seen one of these
+sublime departures from this life can never remain, or become, an
+unbeliever. Such beings exhale, as it were, a celestial fragrance;
+their glances speak of God; the voices are eloquent in the simplest
+words; often they ring like some seraphic instrument revealing the
+secrets of the future. When Monsieur Martener praised her for having
+faithfully followed a harsh prescription the little angel replied, and
+with what a glance!--
+
+"I want to live, dear Monsieur Martener; but less for myself than for
+my grandmother, for my Brigaut, for all of you who will grieve at my
+death."
+
+The first time she went into the garden on a beautiful sunny day in
+November attended by all the household, Madame Auffray asked her if
+she was tired.
+
+"No, now that I have no sufferings but those God sends I can bear
+all," she said. "The joy of being loved gives me strength to suffer."
+
+That was the only time (and then vaguely) that she ever alluded to her
+horrible martyrdom at the Rogrons, whom she never mentioned, and of
+whom no one reminded her, knowing well how painful the memory must be.
+
+"Dear Madame Auffray," she said one day at noon on the terrace, as she
+gazed at the valley, warmed by a glorious sun and colored with the
+glowing tints of autumn, "my death in your house gives me more
+happiness than I have had since I left Brittany."
+
+Madame Auffray whispered in her sister Martener's ear:--
+
+"How she would have loved!"
+
+In truth, her tones, her looks gave to her words a priceless value.
+
+Monsieur Martener corresponded with Doctor Bianchon, and did nothing
+of importance without his advice. He hoped in the first place to
+regular the functions of nature and to draw away the abscess in the
+head through the ear. The more Pierrette suffered, the more he hoped.
+He gained some slight success at times, and that was a great triumph.
+For several days Pierrette's appetite returned and enabled her to take
+nourishing food for which her illness had given her a repugnance; the
+color of her skin changed; but the condition of her head was terrible.
+Monsieur Martener entreated the great physician his adviser to come
+down. Bianchon came, stayed two days, and resolved to undertake an
+operation. To spare the feelings of poor Martener he went to Paris and
+brought back with him the celebrated Desplein. Thus the operation was
+performed by the greatest surgeon of ancient or modern times; but that
+terrible diviner said to Martener as he departed with Bianchon, his
+best-loved pupil:--
+
+"Nothing but a miracle can save her. As Horace told you, caries of the
+bone has begun. At her age the bones are so tender."
+
+The operation was performed at the beginning of March, 1828. During
+all that month, distressed by Pierrette's horrible sufferings,
+Monsieur Martener made several journeys to Paris; there he consulted
+Desplein and Bianchon, and even went so far as to propose to them an
+operation of the nature of lithotrity, which consists in passing into
+the head a hollow instrument by the help of which an heroic remedy can
+be applied to the diseased bone, to arrest the progress of the caries.
+Even the bold Desplein dared not attempt that high-handed surgical
+measure, which despair alone had suggested to Martener. When he
+returned home from Paris he seemed to his friends morose and gloomy.
+He was forced to announce on that fatal evening to the Auffrays and
+Madame Lorrain and to the two priests and Brigaut that science could
+do no more for Pierrette, whose recovery was now in God's hands only.
+The consternation among them was terrible. The grandmother made a vow,
+and requested the priests to say a mass every morning at daybreak
+before Pierrette rose,--a mass at which she and Brigaut might be
+present.
+
+The trial came on. While the victim lay dying, Vinet was calumniating
+her in court. The judge approved and accepted the report of the Family
+Council, and Vinet instantly appealed. The newly appointed /procureur
+du roi/ made a requisition which necessitated fresh evidence. Rogron
+and his sister were forced to give bail to avoid going to prison. The
+order for fresh evidence included that of Pierrette herself. When
+Monsieur Desfondrilles came to the Auffrays' to receive it, Pierrette
+was dying, her confessor was at her bedside about to administer
+extreme unction. At that moment she entreated all present to forgive
+her cousins as she herself forgave them, saying with her simple good
+sense that the judgment of these things belonged to God alone.
+
+"Grandmother," she said, "leave all you have to Brigaut" (Brigaut
+burst into tears); "and," continued Pierrette, "give a thousand francs
+to that kind Adele who warmed my bed. If Adele had remained with my
+cousins I should not now be dying."
+
+It was at three o'clock on the Tuesday of Easter week, on a beautiful,
+bright day, that the angel ceased to suffer. Her heroic grandmother
+wished to watch all that night with the priests, and to sew with her
+stiff old fingers her darling's shroud. Towards evening Brigaut left
+the Auffray's house and went to Frappier's.
+
+"I need not ask you, my poor boy, for news," said the cabinet-maker.
+
+"Pere Frappier, yes, it is ended for her--but not for me."
+
+He cast a look upon the different woods piled up around the shop,--a
+look of painful meaning.
+
+"I understand you, Brigaut," said his worthy master. "Take all you
+want." And he showed him the oaken planks of two-inch thickness.
+
+"Don't help me, Monsieur Frappier," said the Breton, "I wish to do it
+alone."
+
+He passed the night in planing and fitting Pierrette's coffin, and
+more than once his plane took off at a single pass a ribbon of wood
+which was wet with tears. The good man Frappier smoked his pipe and
+watched him silently, saying only, when the four pieces were joined
+together,--
+
+"Make the cover to slide; her poor grandmother will not hear the
+nails."
+
+At daybreak Brigaut went out to fetch the lead to line the coffin. By
+a strange chance, the sheets of lead cost just the sum he had given
+Pierrette for her journey from Nantes to Provins. The brave Breton,
+who was able to resist the awful pain of himself making the coffin of
+his dear one and lining with his memories those burial planks, could
+not bear up against this strange reminder. His strength gave way; he
+was not able to lift the lead, and the plumber, seeing this, came with
+him, and offered to accompany him to the house and solder the last
+sheet when the body had been laid in the coffin.
+
+The Breton burned the plane and all the tools he had used. Then he
+settled his accounts with Frappier and bade him farewell. The heroism
+with which the poor lad personally performed, like the grandmother,
+the last offices for Pierrette made him a sharer in the awful scene
+which crowned the tyranny of the Rogrons.
+
+Brigaut and the plumber reached the house of Monsieur Auffray just in
+time to decide by their own main force an infamous and shocking
+judicial question. The room where the dead girl lay was full of
+people, and presented to the eyes of the two men a singular sight. The
+Rogron emissaries were standing beside the body of their victim, to
+torture her even after death. The corpse of the child, solemn in its
+beauty, lay on the cot-bed of her grandmother. Pierrette's eyes were
+closed, the brown hair smoothed upon her brow, the body swathed in a
+coarse cotton sheet.
+
+Before the bed, on her knees, her hair in disorder, her hands
+stretched out, her face on fire, the old Lorrain was crying out, "No,
+no, it shall not be done!"
+
+At the foot of the bed stood Monsieur Auffray and the two priests. The
+tapers were still burning.
+
+Opposite to the grandmother was the surgeon of the hospital, with an
+assistant, and near him stood Doctor Neraud and Vinet. The surgeon
+wore his dissecting apron; the assistant had opened a case of
+instruments and was handing him a knife.
+
+This scene was interrupted by the noise of the coffin which Brigaut
+and the plumber set down upon the floor. Then Brigaut, advancing, was
+horrified at the sight of Madame Lorrain, who was now weeping.
+
+"What is the matter?" he asked, standing beside her and grasping the
+chisel convulsively in his hand.
+
+"This," said the old woman, "/this/, Brigaut: they want to open the
+body of my child and cut into her head, and stab her heart after her
+death as they did when she was living."
+
+"Who?" said Brigaut, in a voice that might have deafened the men of
+law.
+
+"The Rogrons."
+
+"In the sacred name of God!--"
+
+"Stop, Brigaut," said Monsieur Auffray, seeing the lad brandish his
+chisel.
+
+"Monsieur Auffray," said Brigaut, as white as his dead companion, "I
+hear you because you are Monsieur Auffray, but at this moment I will
+not listen to--"
+
+"The law!" said Auffray.
+
+"Is there law? is there justice?" cried the Breton. "Justice, this is
+it!" and he advanced to the lawyer and the doctors, threatening them
+with his chisel.
+
+"My friend," said the curate, "the law has been invoked by the lawyer
+of Monsieur Rogron, who is under the weight of a serious accusation;
+and it is impossible for us to refuse him the means of justification.
+The lawyer of Monsieur Rogron claims that if the poor child died of an
+abscess in her head her former guardian cannot be blamed, for it is
+proved that Pierrette concealed the effects of the blow which she gave
+to herself--"
+
+"Enough!" said Brigaut.
+
+"My client--" began Vinet.
+
+"Your client," cried the Breton, "shall go to hell and I to the
+scaffold; for if one of you dares to touch her whom your client has
+killed, I will kill him if my weapon does its duty."
+
+"This is interference with the law," said Vinet. "I shall instantly
+inform the court."
+
+The five men left the room.
+
+"Oh, my son!" cried the old woman, rising from her knees and falling
+on Brigaut's neck, "let us bury her quick,--they will come back."
+
+"If we solder the lead," said the plumber, "they may not dare to open
+it."
+
+Monsieur Auffray hastened to his brother-in-law, Monsieur Lesourd, to
+try and settle the matter. Vinet was not unwilling. Pierrette being
+dead the suit about the guardianship fell, of course, to the ground.
+All the astute lawyer wanted was the effect produced by his request.
+
+At midday Monsieur Desfondrilles made his report on the case, and the
+court rendered a decision that there was no ground for further action.
+
+Rogron dared not go to Pierrette's funeral, at which the whole town
+was present. Vinet wished to force him there, but the miserable man
+was afraid of exciting universal horror.
+
+Brigaut left Provins after watching the filling up of the grave where
+Pierrette lay, and went on foot to Paris. He wrote a petition to the
+Dauphiness asking, in the name of his father, that he might enter the
+Royal guard, to which he was at once admitted. When the expedition to
+Algiers was undertaken he wrote to her again, to obtain employment in
+it. He was then a sergeant; Marshal Bourmont gave him an appointment
+as sub-lieutenant in a line regiment. The major's son behaved like a
+man who wished to die. Death has, however, respected Jacques Brigaut
+up to the present time; although he has distinguished himself in all
+the recent expeditions he has never yet been wounded. He is now major
+in a regiment of infantry. No officer is more taciturn or more
+trustworthy. Outside of his duty he is almost mute; he walks alone and
+lives mechanically. Every one divines and respects a hidden sorrow. He
+possesses forty-six thousand francs, which old Madame Lorrain, who
+died in Paris in 1829, bequeathed to him.
+
+At the elections of 1830 Vinet was made a deputy. The services he
+rendered the new government have now earned him the position of
+/procureur-general/. His influence is such that he will always remain
+a deputy. Rogron is receiver-general in the same town where Vinet
+fulfils his legal functions; and by one of those curious tricks of
+chance which do so often occur, Monsieur Tiphaine is president of the
+Royal court in the same town,--for the worthy man gave in his adhesion
+to the dynasty of July without the slightest hesitation. The
+ex-beautiful Madame Tiphaine lives on excellent terms with the
+beautiful Madame Rogron. Vinet is hand in glove with Madame Tiphaine.
+
+As to the imbecile Rogron, he makes such remarks as, "Louis-Philippe
+will never be really king till he is able to make nobles."
+
+The speech is evidently not his own. His health is failing, which
+allows Madame Rogron to hope she may soon marry the General Marquis de
+Montriveau, peer of France, who commands the department, and is paying
+her attentions. Vinet is in his element, seeking victims; he never
+believes in the innocence of an accused person. This thoroughbred
+prosecutor is held to be one of the most amiable men on the circuit;
+and he is no less liked in Paris and in the Chamber; at court he is a
+charming courtier.
+
+According to a certain promise made by Vinet, General Baron Gouraud,
+that noble relic of our glorious armies, married a Mademoiselle
+Matifat, twenty-five years old, daughter of a druggist in the rue des
+Lombards, whose dowry was a hundred thousand francs. He commands (as
+Vinet prophesied) a department in the neighborhood of Paris. He was
+named peer of France for his conduct in the riots which occurred
+during the ministry of Casimir Perier. Baron Gouraud was one of the
+generals who took the church of Saint-Merry, delighted to rap those
+rascally civilians who had vexed him for years over the knuckles; for
+which service he was rewarded with the grand cordon of the Legion of
+honor.
+
+None of the personages connected with Pierrette's death ever felt the
+slightest remorse about it. Monsieur Desfondrilles is still
+archaeological, but, in order to compass his own election, the
+/procureur general/ Vinet took pains to have him appointed president
+of the Provins court. Sylvie has a little circle, and manages her
+brother's property; she lends her own money at high interest, and does
+not spend more than twelve hundred francs a year.
+
+From time to time, when some former son or daughter of Provins returns
+from Paris to settle down, you may hear them ask, as they leave
+Mademoiselle Rogron's house, "Wasn't there a painful story against the
+Rogrons,--something about a ward?"
+
+"Mere prejudice," replies Monsieur Desfondrilles. "Certain persons
+tried to make us believe falsehoods. Out of kindness of heart the
+Rogrons took in a girl named Pierrette, quite pretty but with no
+money. Just as she was growing up she had an intrigue with a young
+man, and stood at her window barefooted talking to him. The lovers
+passed notes to each other by a string. She took cold in this way and
+died, having no constitution. The Rogrons behaved admirably. They made
+no claim on certain property which was to come to her,--they gave it
+all up to the grandmother. The moral of it was, my good friend, that
+the devil punishes those who try to benefit others."
+
+"Ah! that is quite another story from the one old Frappier told me."
+
+"Frappier consults his wine-cellar more than he does his memory,"
+remarked another of Mademoiselle Rogron's visitors.
+
+"But that old priest, Monsieur Habert says--"
+
+"Oh, he! don't you know why?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He wanted to marry his sister to Monsieur Rogron, the receiver-
+general."
+
+*****
+
+Two men think of Pierrette daily: Doctor Martener and Major Brigaut;
+they alone know the hideous truth.
+
+To give that truth its true proportions we must transport the scene to
+the Rome of the middle ages, where a sublime young girl, Beatrice
+Cenci, was brought to the scaffold by motives and intrigues that were
+almost identical with those which laid our Pierrette in her grave.
+Beatrice Cenci had but one defender,--an artist, a painter. In our day
+history, and living men, on the faith of Guido Reni's portrait,
+condemn the Pope, and know that Beatrice was a most tender victim of
+infamous passions and base feuds.
+
+We must all agree that legality would be a fine thing for social
+scoundrelism IF THERE WERE NO GOD.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Bianchon, Horace
+  Father Goriot
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Commission in Lunacy
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  The Government Clerks
+  A Study of Woman
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Honorine
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  The Magic Skin
+  A Second Home
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  The Muse of the Department
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Country Parson
+In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
+  Another Study of Woman
+  La Grande Breteche
+
+Brigaut, Major
+  The Chouans
+
+Desplein
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cousin Pons
+  Lost Illusions
+  The Thirteen
+  The Government Clerks
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Honorine
+
+Gouraud, General, Baron
+  Cousin Pons
+
+Keller, Adolphe
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cesar Birotteau
+
+Matifat, Mademoiselle
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+
+Montriveau, General Marquis Armand de
+  The Thirteen
+  Father Goriot
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Nucingen, Baron Frederic de
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  Father Goriot
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Man of Business
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Muse of the Department
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Roguin
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Eugenie Grandet
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Vendetta
+
+Roguin, Madame
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
+  A Second Home
+  A Daughter of Eve
+
+Tillet, Ferdinand du
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  The Middle Classes
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Melmoth Reconciled
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Member for Arcis
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Tiphaine, Madame
+  The Vendetta
+
+Vinet
+  The Member for Arcis
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cousin Pons
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Pierrette, by Honore de Balzac
+