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!