The Celibates | Page 6

moment, were usually modified in public by a sort of commercial
smile,--a bourgeois smirk which mimicked good-humor; so that
persons meeting with this old maid might very well take her for a
kindly woman. She owned the house on shares with her brother. The
brother, by-the-bye, was sleeping so tranquilly in his own chamber that
the orchestra of the Opera-house could not have awakened him,
wonderful as its diapason is said to be.
The old maid stretched her neck out of the window, twisted it, and
raised her cold, pale-blue little eyes, with their short lashes set in lids
that were always rather swollen, to the attic window, endeavoring to
see Pierrette. Perceiving the uselessness of that attempt, she retreated

into her room with a movement like that of a tortoise which draws in its
head after protruding it from its carapace. The blinds were then closed,
and the silence of the street was unbroken except by peasants coming in
from the country, or very early persons moving about.
When there is an old maid in a house, watch-dogs are unnecessary; not
the slightest event can occur that she does not see and comment upon
and pursue to its utmost consequences. The foregoing trifling
circumstance was therefore destined to give rise to grave suppositions,
and to open the way for one of those obscure dramas which take place
in families, and are none the less terrible because they are secret,--if,
indeed, we may apply the word "drama" to such domestic occurrences.
Pierrette did not go back to bed. To her, Brigaut's arrival was an
immense event. During the night--that Eden of the wretched--she
escaped the vexations and fault-findings she bore during the day. Like
the hero of a ballad, German or Russian, I forget which, her sleep
seemed to her the happy life; her waking hours a bad dream. She had
just had her only pleasurable waking in three years. The memories of
her childhood had sung their melodious ditties in her soul. The first
couplet was heard in a dream; the second made her spring out of bed; at
the third, she doubted her ears,--the sorrowful are all disciples of Saint
Thomas; but when the fourth was sung, standing in her night- gown
with bare feet by the window, she recognized Brigaut, the companion
of her childhood. Ah, yes! it was truly the well-known square jacket
with the bobtails, the pockets of which stuck out at the hips,--the jacket
of blue cloth which is classic in Brittany; there, too, were the waistcoat
of printed cotton, the linen shirt fastened by a gold heart, the large
rolling collar, the earrings, the stout shoes, the trousers of blue-gray
drilling unevenly colored by the various lengths of the warp,--in short,
all those humble, strong, and durable things which make the apparel of
the Breton peasantry. The big buttons of white horn which fastened the
jacket made the girl's heart beat. When she saw the bunch of broom her
eyes filled with tears; then a dreadful fear drove back into her heart the
happy memories 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