The Village Rector | Page 7

Easter. In the summer season she was feted with bouquets kept fresh in
tumblers of blue glass; this was particularly the case after the birth of
Veronique. On the days of the processions the Sauviats scrupulously
hung their house with sheets covered with flowers, and contributed
money to the erection and adornment of the altar, which was the pride
and glory of the whole square.
Veronique Sauviat was, therefore, brought up in a Christian manner.
From the time she was seven years old she was taught by a Gray sister
from Auvergne to whom the Sauviats had done some kindness in
former times. Both husband and wife were obliging when the matter
did not affect their pockets or consume their time,--like all poor folk
who are cordially ready to be serviceable to others in their own way.
The Gray sister taught Veronique to read and write; she also taught her
the history of the people of God, the catechism, the Old and the New
Testaments, and a very little arithmetic. That was all; the worthy sister
thought it enough; it was in fact too much.
At nine years of age Veronique surprised the whole neighborhood with
her beauty. Every one admired her face, which promised much to the
pencil of artists who are always seeking a noble ideal. She was called
"the Little Virgin" and showed signs already of a fine figure and great
delicacy of complexion. Her Madonna-like face--for the popular voice
had well named her--was surrounded by a wealth of fair hair, which
brought out the purity of her features. Whoever has seen the sublime
Virgin of Titian in his great picture of the "Presentation" at Venice, will
know that Veronique was in her girlhood,--the same ingenuous candor,
the same seraphic astonishment in her eyes, the same simple yet noble
attitude, the same majesty of childhood in her demeanor.
At eleven years of age she had the small-pox, and owed her life to the
care of Soeur Marthe. During the two months that their child was in

danger the Sauviats betrayed to the whole community the depth of their
tenderness. Sauviat no longer went about the country to sales; he stayed
in the shop, going upstairs and down to his daughter's room, sitting up
with her every night in company with his wife. His silent anguish
seemed so great that no one dared to speak to him; his neighbors
looked at him with compassion, but they only asked news of Veronique
from Soeur Marthe. During the days when the child's danger reached a
crisis, the neighbors and passers saw, for the first and only time in
Sauviat's life, tears in his eyes and rolling down his hollow cheeks; he
did not wipe them, but stood for hours as if stupefied, not daring to go
upstairs to his daughter's room, gazing before him and seeing nothing,
so oblivious of all things that any one might have robbed him.
Veronique was saved, but her beauty perished. Her face, once
exquisitely colored with a tint in which brown and rose were
harmoniously mingled, came out from the disease with a myriad of pits
which thickened the skin, the flesh beneath it being deeply indented.
Even her forehead did not escape the ravages of the scourge; it turned
brown and looked as though it were hammered, like metal. Nothing can
be more discordant than brick tones of the skin surrounded by golden
hair; they destroy all harmony. These fissures in the tissues,
capriciously hollowed, injured the purity of the profile and the delicacy
of the lines of the face, especially that of the nose, the Grecian form of
which was lost, and that of the chin, once as exquisitely rounded as a
piece of white porcelain. The disease left nothing unharmed except the
parts it was unable to reach,--the eyes and the teeth. She did not,
however, lose the elegance and beauty of her shape,--neither the fulness
of its lines nor the grace and suppleness of her waist. At fifteen
Veronique was still a fine girl, and to the great consolation of her father
and mother, a good and pious girl, busy, industrious, and domestic.
After her convalescence and after she had made her first communion,
her parents gave her the two chambers on the second floor for her own
particular dwelling. Sauviat, so course in his way of living for himself
and his wife, now had certain perceptions of what comfort might be; a
vague idea came to him of consoling his child for her great loss, which,
as yet, she did not comprehend. The deprivation of that beauty which
was once the pride and joy of those two beings made Veronique the
more dear and precious to them. Sauviat came home one day, bearing a

carpet he had chanced upon in some