Pierrette | Page 6

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