The Celibates | Page 7

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 and truces, old Auffray himself
(formerly a grocer) died, at the age of eighty-eight, without having
found time to make a will. His property was administered by his
daughter, Madame Rogron, and her husband so completely in their own
interests that nothing remained for the old man's widow beyond the
house she lived in on the little square, and a few acres of land. This
widow, the mother of Madame Lorrain, was only thirty-eight at the
time of her husband's death. Like many widows, she came to the
unwise decision of remarrying. She sold the house and land to her step-
daughter, Madame Rogron, and married a young physician named

Neraud, who wasted her whole fortune. She died of grief and misery
two years later.
Thus the share of her father's property which ought to have come to
Madame Lorrain disappeared almost entirely, being reduced to the
small sum of eight thousand francs. Major Lorrain was killed at the
battle of Montereau, leaving his wife, then twenty-one years of age,
with a little daughter of fourteen months, and no other means than the
pension to which she was entitled and an eventual inheritance from her
late husband's parents, Monsieur and Madame Lorrain, retail
shopkeepers at Pen-Hoel, a village in the Vendee, situated in that part
of it which is called the Marais. These Lorrains, grandfather and
grandmother of Pierrette Lorrain, sold wood for building purposes,
slates, tiles, pantiles, pipes, etc. Their business, either from their own
incapacity or through ill-luck, did badly, and gave them scarcely
enough to live on. The failure of the well-known firm of Collinet at
Nantes, caused by the events of 1814 which led to a sudden fall in
colonial products, deprived them of twenty-four thousand