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.