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.