Meantime Rogron’s marriage with Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf took place.
Sylvie moved to the second floor of the house, which she shared with
Madame de Chargeboeuf, for the first floor was entirely taken up by the
new wife. The beautiful Madame Rogron succeeded to the social place
of the beautiful Madame Tiphaine. The influence of the marriage was
immense. No one now came to visit Sylvie, but Madame Rogron’s salon was
always full.
Sustained by the influence of his mother-in-law and the bankers du
Tillet and Nucingen, Monsieur Tiphaine was fortunate enough to do some
service to the administration; he became one of its chief orators, was
made judge in the civil courts, and obtained the appointment of his
nephew Lesourd to his own vacant place as president of the court of
Provins. This appointment greatly annoyed Desfondrilles. The Keeper of
the Seals sent down one of his own proteges to fill Lesourd’s place.
The promotion of Monsieur Tiphaine and his translation to Paris
were therefore of no benefit at all to the Vinet party; but Vinet
nevertheless made a clever use of the result. He had always told the
Provins people that they were being used as a stepping-stone to raise
the crafty Madame Tiphaine into grandeur; Tiphaine himself had tricked
them; Madame Tiphaine despised both Provins and its people in her
heart, and would never return there again. Just at this crisis Monsieur
Tiphaine’s father died; his son inherited a fine estate and sold his
house in Provins to Monsieur Julliard. The sale proved to the minds of
all how little the Tiphaines thought of Provins. Vinet was right;
Vinet had been a true prophet. These things had great influence on the
question of Pierrette’s guardianship.
Thus the dreadful martyrdom brutally inflicted on the poor child by two
imbecile tyrants (which led, through its consequences, to the terrible
operation of trepanning, performed by Monsieur Martener under the advice
of Doctor Bianchon),--all this horrible drama reduced to judicial
form was left to float in the vile mess called in legal parlance
the calendar. The case was made to drag through the delays and the
interminable labyrinths of the law, by the shufflings of an unprincipled
lawyer; and during all this time the calumniated girl languished in the
agony of the worst pain known to science.
Monsieur Martener, together with the Auffray family, were soon charmed
by the beauty of Pierrette’s nature and the character of her old
grandmother, whose feelings, ideas, and ways bore the stamp of Roman
antiquity,--this matron of the Marais was like a woman in Plutarch.
Doctor Martener struggled bravely with death, which already grasped its
prey. From the first, Bianchon and the hospital surgeon had considered
Pierrette doomed; and there now took place between the doctor and the
disease, the former relying on Pierrette’s youth, one of those struggles
which physicians alone comprehend,--the reward of which, in case of
success, is never found in the venal pay nor in the patients themselves,
but in the gentle satisfaction of conscience, in the invisible ideal
palm gathered by true artists from the contentment which fills their
soul after accomplishing a noble work. The physician strains towards
good as an artist towards beauty, each impelled by that grand sentiment
which we call virtue. This daily contest wiped out of Doctor Martener’s
mind the petty irritations of that other contest of the Tiphaines and
the Vinets,--as always happens to men when they find themselves face to
face with a great and real misery to conquer.
Monsieur Martener had begun his career in Paris; but the cruel activity
of the city and its insensibility to its masses of suffering had shocked
his gentle soul, fitted only for the quiet life of the provinces.
Moreover, he was under the yoke of his beautiful native land. He
returned to Provins, where he married and settled, and cared almost
lovingly for the people, who were to him like a large family. During
the whole of Pierrette’s illness he was careful not to speak of her. His
reluctance to answer the questions of those who asked about her was so
evident that persons soon ceased to put them. Pierrette was to him, what
indeed she truly was, a poem, mysterious, profound, vast in suffering,
such as doctors find at times in their terrible experience. He felt an
admiration for this delicate young creature which he would not share
with any one.
This feeling of the physician for his patient was, however,
unconsciously communicated (like all true feelings) to Monsieur and
Madame Auffray, whose house became, so long as Pierrette was in it,
quiet and silent. The children, who had formerly played so joyously with
her, agreed among themselves with the loving grace of childhood to be
neither noisy nor troublesome. They made it a point of honor to be good
because Pierrette was ill. Monsieur Auffray’s house was in the Upper
town, beneath the ruins of the Chateau, and it was built upon a sort of
terrace formed by the overthrow of the old ramparts. The occupants could
have a view of the valley from the little fruit-garden enclosed by walls
which overlooked the town. The roofs of the other houses came to about
the level of the lower wall of this garden. Along the terrace ran a
path, by which Monsieur Auffray’s study could be entered through a glass
door; at the other end of the path was an arbor of grape vines and a
fig-tree, beneath which stood a round table, a bench and some chairs,
painted green. Pierrette’s bedroom was above the study of her new
guardian. Madame Lorrain slept in a cot beside her grandchild. From her
window Pierrette could see the whole of the glorious valley of Provins,
which she hardly knew, so seldom had she left that dreadful house of the
Rogrons. When the weather was fine she loved to drag herself, resting on
her grandmother’s arm, to the vine-clad arbor. Brigaut, unable to work,
came three times a day to see his little friend; he was gnawed by a
grief which made him indifferent to life. He lay in wait like a dog
for Monsieur Martener, and followed him when he left the house. The old
grandmother, drunk with grief, had the courage to conceal her despair;
she showed her darling the smiling face she formerly wore at Pen-Hoel.
In her desire to produce that illusion in the girl’s mind, she made her
a little Breton cap like the one Pierrette had worn on her first arrival
in Provins; it made the darling seem more like her childlike self; in it
she was delightful to look upon, her sweet face circled with a halo of
cambric and fluted lace. Her skin, white with the whiteness of unglazed
porcelain, her forehead, where suffering had printed the semblance of
deep thought, the purity of the lines refined by illness, the slowness
of the glances, and the occasional fixity of the eyes, made Pierrette
an almost perfect embodiment of melancholy. She was served by all with a
sort of fanaticism; she was felt to be so gentle, so tender, so loving.
Madame Martener sent her piano to her sister Madame Auffray, thinking
to amuse Pierrette who was passionately fond of music. It was a poem to
watch her listening to a theme of Weber, or Beethoven, or Herold,--her
eyes raised, her lips silent, regretting no doubt the life escaping
her. The cure Peroux and Monsieur Habert, her two religious comforters,
admired her saintly resignation. Surely the seraphic perfection of young
girls and young men marked with the hectic of death, is a wonderful fact
worthy of the attention alike of philosophers and of heedless minds.
He who has ever seen one of these sublime departures from this life can
never remain, or become, an unbeliever. Such beings exhale, as it
were, a celestial fragrance; their glances speak of God; the voices
are eloquent in the simplest words; often they ring like some seraphic
instrument revealing the secrets of the future. When Monsieur Martener
praised her for having faithfully followed a harsh prescription the
little angel replied, and with what a glance--!
“I want to live, dear Monsieur Martener; but less for myself than for
my grandmother, for my Brigaut, for all of you who will grieve at my
death.”
The first time she went into the garden on a beautiful sunny day in
November attended by all the household, Madame Auffray asked her if she
was tired.
“No, now that I have no sufferings but those God sends I can bear all,”
she said. “The joy of being loved gives me strength to suffer.”
That was the only time (and then vaguely) that she ever alluded to her
horrible martyrdom at the Rogrons, whom she never mentioned, and of whom
no one reminded her, knowing well how painful the memory must be.
“Dear Madame Auffray,” she said one day at noon on the terrace, as
she gazed at the valley, warmed by a glorious sun and colored with the
glowing tints of autumn, “my death in your house gives me more happiness
than I have had since I left Brittany.”