Mère Girauds Little Daughter | Page 2

Mère
Giraud fretted at the difference between the two. And Valentin was her
first, and what mother does not look for great things in her first? We
cannot help feeling that something must come of one's own charms if
one has any, and Mère Giraud was a handsome bride. An ugly bantling
seems to offer one a sort of insult, particularly at first, when one is

young and vain."
"There was no more beautiful young girl than Laure Giraud at sixteen,"
said Jeanne Tallot.
"And none more useless," said Annot loudly. "Give me a young girl
who is industrious and honest. My Margot is better provided for than
Laure Giraud was before her marriage; but her hands are not white, nor
is her waist but a span around. She has too much work to do. She is not
a tall, white, swaying creature who is too good to churn and tend the
creatures who give her food. I have heard it said that Laure would have
worked if her mother had permitted it, but I don't believe it. She had not
a working look. Mademoiselle Laure was too good for the labor of
humble people; she must go to Paris and learn a fine, delicate trade."
"But good came of it," put in Jeanne Tallot, "It proved all the better for
her."
"Let her mother thank the Virgin, then," cried Annot, contemptuously.
"It might not have proved the better; 'it might have proved the worse;
evil might have come of it instead of good. Who among us has not
heard of such things? Did not Marie Gautier go to Paris too?"
"Ah, poor little one, indeed!" sighed the white caps.
"And in two years," added Annot, "her mother died of a broken heart."
"But," said cheerful Jeanne, somewhat dryly, "Laure's mother is not
dead yet, so let us congratulate ourselves that to go to Paris has brought
luck to one of our number at least, and let us deal charitably with Mere
Giraud, who certainly means well, and is only naturally proud of her
daughter's grandeur. For my part, I can afford to rejoice with her."
She rolled up her stout stocking into a ball, and stuck her needles
through it, nodding at the three women.
"I promised I would drop in and spend a few minutes with her this
morning," she said; "so I will bid you good-day," and she stepped

across the threshold and trudged off in the sunshine, her wooden shoes
sounding bravely on the path.
It was only a little place,--St. Croix, as we shall call it for want of a
better name,--a little village of one street, and of many vines, and roses,
and orchards, and of much gossip. Simple people inhabited it,--simple,
ignorant folk, who knew one another, and discussed one another's faults
and grape-crops with equal frankness, worked hard, lived frugally,
confessed regularly, and slept well. Devout people, and ignorant, who
believed that the little shrines they erected in their vineyards brought
blessings upon their grapes, and who knew nothing of the great world
beyond, and spoke of Paris with awe, and even a shade of doubt. Living
the same lives generation after generation, tilling the same crops, and
praying before the same stone altar in the small, quaint church, it is not
to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any one of their
number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. There were those in St.
Croix who had known Mère Giraud's grandfather, a slow-spoken,
kindly old peasant, who had drunk his vin ordinaire, and smoked his
pipe with the poorest; and there was not one who did not well know
Mère Giraud herself, and who had not watched the growth of the little
Laure, who had bloomed into a beauty not unlike the beauty of the
white Provence roses which climbed over and around her mother's
cottage door. "Mère Giraud's little daughter," she had been called, even
after she grew into the wonderfully tall and wonderfully fair creature
she became before she left the village, accompanying her brother
Valentin to Paris.
"Ma foi!" said the men, "but she is truly a beauty, Mère Giraud's little
daughter!"
"She should be well looked to," said the wiseacres,--"Mère Giraud's
little daughter."
"There is one we must always give way before," said the best-natured
among the girls, "and that one is Mère Giraud's little daughter."
The old Curé the parish took interest in her, and gave her lessons, and,
as Mère Giraud would have held her strictly to them, even if she had

not been tractable and studious by nature, she was better educated and
more gently trained than her companions. The fact was, however, that
she had not many companions. Some element in her grace and beauty
seemed to separate her from