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The Celibates

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #7927 · 1,085,431 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Celibates

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Commentator: George Saintsbury

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley


        
Release date: August 10, 2005 [eBook #7927]
                Most recently updated: December 30, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7927

Credits: Produced by John Bickers; and Dagny


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CELIBATES ***




Produced by John Bickers; and Dagny





                            THE CELIBATES

                                  BY

                           HONORE DE BALZAC




                             INTRODUCTION

_Les Celibataires_, the longest number of the original _Comedie
Humaine_ under a single title, next to _Illusions perdues_, is not,
like that book, connected by any unity of story. Indeed, the general
bond of union is pretty weak; and though it is quite true that
bachelors and old maids are the heroes and heroines of all three, it
would be rather hard to establish any other bond of connection, and it
is rather unlikely that any one unprompted would fix on this as a
sufficient ground of partnership.

Two at least of the component parts, however, are of very high
excellence. I do not myself think that _Pierrette_, which opens the
series, is quite the equal of its companions. Written, as it was, for
Countess Anna de Hanska, Balzac's step-daughter of the future, while
she was still very young, it partakes necessarily of the rather
elaborate artificiality of all attempts to suit the young person, of
French attempts in particular, and it may perhaps be said of Balzac's
attempts most of all. It belongs, in a way, to the Arcis series--the
series which also includes the fine _Tenebreuse Affaire_ and the
unfinished _Depute d'Arcis_--but is not very closely connected
therewith. The picture of the actual _Celibataires_, the brother and
sister Rogron, with which it opens, is one of Balzac's best styles,
and is executed with all his usual mastery both of the minute and of
the at least partially repulsive, showing also that strange knowledge
of the _bourgeois de Paris_ which, somehow or other, he seems to have
attained by dint of unknown foregatherings in his ten years of
apprenticeship. But when we come to _Pierrette_ herself, the story is,
I think, rather less satisfying. Her persecutions and her end, and the
devotion of the faithful Brigaut and the rest, are pathetic no doubt,
but tend (I hope it is not heartless to say it) just a very little
towards _sensiblerie_. The fact is that the thing is not quite in
Balzac's line.

_Le Cure de Tours_, is certainly on a higher level, and has attracted
the most magnificent eulogies from some of the novelist's admirers. I
think both Mr. Henry James and Mr. Wedmore have singled out this
little piece for detailed and elaborate praise, and there is no doubt
that it is a happy example of a kind in which the author excelled. The
opening, with its evident but not obtruded remembrance of the old and
well-founded superstition--derived from the universal belief in some
form of Nemesis--that an extraordinary sense of happiness, good luck,
or anything of the kind, is a precursor of misfortune, and calls for
some instant act of sacrifice or humiliation, is very striking; and
the working out of the vengeance of the goddess by the very
ungoddess-like though feminine hand of Mademoiselle Gamard has much
that is commendable. Nothing in its well exampled kind is better
touched off than the Listomere coterie, from the shrewdness of Monsieur
de Bourbonne to the selfishness of Madame de Listomere. I do not know
that the old maid herself--cat, and far worst than cat as she is--is at
all exaggerated, and the sketch of the coveted _appartement_ and its
ill-fated _mobilier_ is about as good as it can be. And the battle
between Madame de Listomere and the Abbe Troubert, which has served as
a model for many similar things, has, if it has often been equaled,
not often been surpassed.

I cannot, however, help thinking that there is more than a little
exaggeration in more than one point of the story. The Abbe Birotteau
is surely a little too much of a fool; the Abbe Troubert an Iago a
little too much wanting in verisimilitude; and the central incident of
the clause about the furniture too manifestly improbable. Taking the
first and the last points together, is it likely that any one not
quite an idiot should, in the first place, remain so entirely ignorant
of the value of his property; should, in the second, though, ignorant
or not, he attached the greatest possible _pretium affectionis_ to it,
contract to resign it for such a ridiculous consideration; and should,
in the third, take the fatal step without so much as remembering the
condition attached thereto? If it be answered that Birotteau _was_
idiot enough to do such a thing, then it must be observed further that
one's sympathy is frozen by the fact. Such a man deserved such
treatment. And, again, even if French justice was, and perhaps is, as
much influenced by secret considerations as Balzac loves to represent
it, we must agree with that member of the Listomere society who
pointed out that no tribunal could possibly uphold such an obviously
iniquitous bargain. As for Troubert, the idea of the Jesuitical
ecclesiastic (though Balzac was not personally hostile to the Jesuits)
was a common one at the time, and no doubt popular, but the actual
personage seems to me nearer to Eugene Sue's Rodin in some ways than I
could have desired.

These things, however, are very much a case of "As You Like It" or "As
It Strikes You," and I have said that _Le Cure de Tours_ strikes some
good judges as of exceptional merit, while no one can refuse it merit
in a high degree. I should not, except for the opening, place it in
the very highest class of the _Comedie_, but it is high beyond all
doubt in the second.

The third part (The Two Brothers/A Bachelor's Establishment) of _Les
Celibataires_ takes very high rank among its companions. As in most of
his best books, Balzac has set at work divers favorite springs of
action, and has introduced personages of whom he has elsewhere given,
not exactly replicas--he never did that--but companion portraits. And
he has once more justified the proceeding amply. Whether he has not
also justified the reproach, such as it is, of those who say that to
see the most congenial expression of his fullest genius, you must go
to his bad characters and not to his good, readers shall determine for
themselves after reading the book.

It was the product of the year 1842, when the author was at the ripest
of his powers, and after which, with the exception of _Les Parents
Pauvres_, he produced not much of his very best save in continuations
and rehandlings of earlier efforts. He changed his title a good deal,
and in that MS. correction of a copy of the _Comedie_ which has been
taken, perhaps without absolutely decisive authority, as the basis of
the _Edition Definitive_, he adopted _La Rabouilleuse_ as his latest
favorite. This, besides its quaintness, has undoubted merit as fixing
the attention on one at least of the chief figures of the book, while
_Un Menage de garcon_ only obliquely indicates the real purport of the
novel. Jean-Jacques Rouget is a most unfortunate creature, who
anticipates Baron Hulot as an example of absolute dependence on things
of the flesh, _plus_ a kind of cretinism, which Hulot, to do him
justice, does not exhibit even in his worst degradation. But his
"bachelor establishment," though undoubtedly useful for the purposes
of the story, might have been changed for something else, and his
personality have been considerably altered, without very much
affecting the general drift of the fiction.

Flore Brazier, on the other hand, the _Rabouilleuse_ herself, is
essential, and with Maxence Gilet and Philippe Bridau forms the centre
of the action and the passion of the book. She ranks, indeed, with
those few feminine types, Valerie Marneffe, La Cousine Bette, Eugenie
Grandet, Beatrix, Madame de Maufrigneuse, and perhaps Esther Gobseck,
whom Balzac has tried to draw at full length. It is to be observed
that though quite without morals of any kind, she is not _ab initio_
or intrinsically a she-fiend like Valerie or Lisbeth. She does not do
harm for harm's sake, nor even directly to gratify spite, greed, or
other purely unsocial and detestable passions. She is a type of
feminine sensuality of the less ambitious and restless sort. Given a
decent education, a fair fortune, a good-looking and vigorous husband
to whom she had taken a fancy, and no special temptation, and she
might have been a blameless, merry, "sonsy" _commere_, and have died
in an odor of very reasonable sanctity. Poverty, ignorance, the
Rougets (father and son), Maxence Gilet, and Philippe Bridau came in
her way, and she lived and died as Balzac has shown her. He has done
nothing more "inevitable;" a few things more complete and
satisfactory.

Maxence Gilet is a not much less remarkable sketch, though it is not
easy to say that he is on the same level. Gilet is the man of distinct
gifts, of some virtues, or caricatures of virtues, who goes to the
devil through idleness, fulness of bread, and lack of any worthy
occupation. He is extraordinarily unconventional for a French figure
in fiction, even for a figure drawn by such a French genius as Balzac.
But he is also hardly to be called a great type, and I do not quite
see why he should have succumbed before Philippe as he did.

Philippe himself is more complicated, and, perhaps, more questionable.
He is certainly one of Balzac's _fleurs du mal_; he is studied and
personally conducted from beginning to end with an extraordinary and
loving care; but is he quite "of a piece"? That he should have
succeeded in defeating the combination against which his virtuous
mother and brother failed is not an undue instance of the irony of
life. The defeat of such adversaries as Flore and Max has, of course,
the merit of poetical justice and the interest of "diamond cut
diamond." But is not the terrible Philippe Bridau, the "Mephistopheles
_a cheval_" of the latter part of the book, rather inconsistent with
the common-place ne'er-to-well of the earlier? Not only does it
require no unusual genius to waste money, when you have it, in the
channels of the drinking-shop, the gaming table, and elsewhere, to
sponge for more on your mother and brother, to embezzle when they are
squeezed dry, and to take to downright robbery when nothing else is
left; but a person who, in the various circumstances and opportunities
of Bridau, finds nothing better to do than these ordinary things, can
hardly be a person of exceptional intellectual resource. There is here
surely that sudden and unaccounted-for change of character which the
second-rate novelist and dramatists may permit himself, but from which
the first-rate should abstain.

This, however, may be an academic objection, and certainly the book is
of first-class interest. The minor characters, the mother and brother,
the luckless aunt with her combination at last turning up when the
rascal Philippe has stolen her stake-money, the satellites and
abettors of Max in the club of "La Desoeuvrance," the slightly
theatrical Spaniard, and all the rest of them, are excellent. The book
is an eminently characteristic one--more so, indeed, than more than
one of those in which people are often invited to make acquaintance
with Balzac.

_Pierrette_, which was earlier called _Pierrette Lorrain_, was issued
in 1840, first in the _Siecle_, and then in volume form, published by
Souverain. In both issues it had nine chapter or book divisions with
headings. With the other _Celibataires_ it entered the _Comedie_ as a
_Scene de la Vie de Province_ in 1843.

_Le Cure de Tours_ (which Balzac had at one time intended to call by
the name of the Cure's enemy, and which at first was simply called by
the general title _Les Celibataires_) is much older than its
companions, and appeared in 1832 in the _Scenes de la Vie Privee_. It
was soon properly shifted to the _Vie de Province_, and as such in due
time joined the _Comedie_ bearing its present title.

The third story of _Les Celibataires_ has a rather more varied
bibliographical history than the others. The first part, that dealing
with the early misconduct of Philippe Bridau, was published
separately, as _Les Deux Freres_, in the _Presse_ during the spring of
1841, and a year or so later in volumes. It had nine chapters with
headings. The volume form also included under the same title the
second part, which, as _Un Menage de garcon en Province_, had been
published in the same newspaper in the autumn of 1842. This had
sixteen chapters in both issues, and in the volumes two part-headings
--one identical with the newspaper title, and the other "A qui la
Succession?" The whole book then took rank in the _Comedie_ under the
second title, _Un Menage de garcon_, and retained this during Balzac's
life and long afterwards. In the _Edition Definitive_, as observed
above, he had marked it as _La Rabouilleuse_, after having also
thought of _Le Bonhomme Rouget_. For English use, the better known,
though not last or best title, is clearly preferable, as it can be
translated, while _La Rabouilleuse_ cannot.

    George Saintsbury




                                  I




                             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
th

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