The Celibates | Page 9

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 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,