Pierrette | Page 8

francs, of which one
thousand five hundred went for costs. The remaining eight thousand
came to Madame Lorain, who lived upon the income of them in a sort
of almshouse at Nantes, like that of Sainte- Perine in Paris, called
Saint-Jacques, where the two old people had bed and board for a
humble payment.
As it was impossible to keep Pierrette, their ruined little granddaughter,
with them, the old Lorrains bethought themselves of her uncle and aunt
Rogron, in Provins, to whom they wrote. These Rogrons were dead.
The letter might, therefore, have easily been lost; but if anything here
below can take the place of Providence, it is the post. Postal spirit,
incomparably above public spirit, exceeds in brilliancy of resource and
invention the ablest romance-writers. When the post gets hold of a
letter, worth, to it, from three to ten sous, and does not immediately
know where to find the person to whom that letter is addressed, it
displays a financial anxiety only to be met with in very pertinacious
creditors. The post goes and comes and ferrets through all the
eighty-six departments. Difficulties only arouse the genius of the clerks,
who may really be called men-of-letters, and who set about to search
for that unknown human being with as much ardor as the
mathematicians of the Bureau give to longitudes. They literally ransack
the whole kingdom. At the first ray of hope all the post- offices in Paris
are alert. Sometimes the receiver of a missing letter is amazed at the
network of scrawled directions which covers both back and front of the
missive,--glorious vouchers for the administrative persistency with
which the post has been at work. If a man undertook what the post
accomplishes, he would lose ten thousand francs in travel, time, and
money, to recover ten sous. The letter of the old Lorrains, addressed to
Monsieur Rogron of Provins (who had then been dead a year) was
conveyed by the post in due time to Monsieur Rogron, son of the
deceased, a mercer in the rue Saint-Denis in Paris. And this is where
the postal spirit obtains its greatest triumph. An heir is always more or

less anxious to know if he has picked up every scrap of his inheritance,
if he has not overlooked a credit, or a trunk of old clothes. The
Treasury knows that. A letter addressed to the late Rogron at Provins
was certain to pique the curiosity of Rogron, Jr., or Mademoiselle
Rogron, the heirs in Paris. Out of that human interest the Treasury was
able to earn sixty centimes.
These Rogrons, toward whom the old Lorrains, though dreading to part
with their dear little granddaughter, stretched their supplicating hands,
became, in this way, and most unexpectedly, the masters of Pierrette's
destiny. It is therefore indispensable to explain both their antecedents
and their character.

II
THE ROGRONS
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