Pierrette | Page 9

came home in due time,
after the worst of village training,--allowed to cry for hours after their
wet-nurse, who worked in the fields, leaving them shut up to scream for
her in one of those damp, dark, low rooms which serve as homes for
the French peasantry. Treated thus, the features of the children
coarsened; their voices grew harsh; they mortified their mother's vanity,
and that made her strive to correct their bad habits by a sternness which
the severity of their father converted through comparison to kindness.
As a general thing, they were left to run loose about the stables and
courtyards of the inn, or the streets of the town; sometimes they were
whipped; sometimes they were sent, to get rid of them, to their
grandfather Auffray, who did not like them. The injustice the Rogrons
declared the old man did to their children, justified them to their own
minds in taking the greater part of "the old scoundrel's" property.
However, Rogron did send his son to school, and did buy him a man,
one of his own cartmen, to save him from the conscription. As soon as
his daughter, Sylvie, was thirteen, he sent her to Paris, to make her way
as apprentice in a shop. Two years later he despatched his son,
Jerome-Denis, to the same career. When his friends the carriers and
those who frequented the inn, asked him what he meant to do with his
children, Pere Rogron explained his system with a conciseness which,
in view of that of most fathers, had the merit of frankness.
"When they are old enough to understand me I shall give 'em a kick
and say: 'Go and make your own way in the world!'" he replied,
emptying his glass and wiping his lips with the back of his hand. Then
he winked at his questioner with a knowing look. "Hey! hey! they are
no greater fools than I was," he added. "My father gave me three kicks;
I shall only give them one; he put one louis into my hand; I shall put
ten in theirs, therefore they'll be better off than I was. That's the way to
do. After I'm gone, what's left will be theirs. The notaries can find them
and give it to them. What nonsense to bother one's self about children.
Mine owe me their life. I've fed them, and I don't ask anything from
them,--I call that quits, hey, neighbor? I began as a cartman, but that

didn't prevent me marrying the daughter of that old scoundrel Auffray."
Sylvie Rogron was sent (with six hundred francs for her board) as
apprentice to certain shopkeepers originally from Provins and now
settled in Paris in the rue Saint-Denis. Two years later she was "at par,"
as they say; she earned her own living; at any rate her parents paid
nothing for her. That is what is called being "at par" in the rue
Saint-Denis. Sylvie had a salary of four hundred francs. At nineteen
years of age she was independent. At twenty, she was the second
demoiselle in the Maison Julliard, wholesale silk dealers at the
"Chinese Worm" rue Saint-Denis. The history of the sister was that of
the brother. Young Jerome-Denis Rogron entered the establishment of
one of the largest wholesale mercers in the same street, the Maison
Guepin, at the "Three Distaffs." When Sylvie Rogron, aged twenty-one,
had risen to be forewoman at a thousand francs a year Jerome-Denis,
with even better luck, was head-clerk at eighteen, with a salary of
twelve hundred francs.
Brother and sister met on Sundays and fete-days, which they passed in
economical amusements; they dined out of Paris, and went to Saint-
Cloud, Meudon, Belleville, or Vincennes. Towards the close of the year
1815 they clubbed their savings, amounting to about twenty thousand
francs, earned by the sweat of their brows, and bought of Madame
Guenee the property and good-will of her celebrated shop, the "Family
Sister," one of the largest retail establishments in the quarter. Sylvie
kept the books and did the writing. Jerome-Denis was master and
head-clerk both. In 1821, after five years' experience, competition
became so fierce that it was all the brother and sister could do to carry
on the business and maintain its reputation.
Though Sylvie was at this time scarcely forty, her natural ugliness,
combined with hard work and a certain crabbed look (caused as much
by the conformation of her features as by her cares), made her seem
like a woman of fifty. At thirty-eight Jerome Rogron presented to the
eyes of his customers the silliest face that ever looked over a counter.
His retreating forehead, flattened by fatigue, was marked by three long
wrinkles. His grizzled hair, cut close, expressed in some indefinable
way the stupidity of a cold-blooded