During the first six months after their transplanting, the Rogrons, by favor of their old-time connection with the Julliards, the Guépins, and the Guenées, and by emphasizing their relationship to Monsieur Auffray the notary—a great-grandnephew of their grandfather’s—were received at first by Madame Julliard the elder and Madame Galardon; then, not without difficulty, they found admission to the beautiful Madame Tiphaine’s drawing-room. Everybody wished to know something about the Rogrons before inviting them to call. It was a little difficult to avoid receiving tradespeople of the Rue Saint-Denis, natives of Provins, who had come back to spend their money there. Nevertheless, the instinct of society is always to bring together persons of similar fortune, education, manners, acquaintance, and character. Now the Guépins, the Guenées, and the Julliards were of a higher grade, and of older family, than the Rogrons—the children of a money-lending innkeeper who could not be held blameless in his private life, nor with regard to the Auffray inheritance. Auffray the notary, Madame Galardon’s son-in-law, knew all about it; the estate had been wound up in his predecessor’s office. Those older merchants, who had retired twelve years since, had found themselves on the level of education, breeding, and manners of the circle to which Madame Tiphaine imparted a certain stamp of elegance, of Paris varnish. Everything was homogeneous; they all understood each other, and knew how to conduct themselves, and talk so as to be agreeable to the rest. They knew each other’s characters, and were accustomed to agree. Having been once received by Monsieur Garceland the Maire, the Rogrons flattered themselves that they should soon be on intimate terms with the best society of the town. Sylvie learned to play boston. Rogron, far too stupid to play any game, twirled his thumbs and swallowed his words when once he had talked about his house. But the words acted like medicine; they seemed to torture him cruelly; he rose, he looked as if he were about to speak; he took fright and sat down again, his lips comically convulsed. Sylvie unconsciously displayed her nature at games. Fractious and complaining whenever she lost, insolently triumphant when she won, contentious and fretful, she irritated her adversaries and her partners, and was a nuisance to everybody.
Eaten up with silly and undisguised envy, Rogron and his sister tried to play a part in a town where a dozen families had formed a net of close meshes; all their interests, all their vanities made, as it were, a slippery floor on which newcomers had to tread very cautiously to avoid running up against something or getting a fall. Allowing that the rebuilding of their house might cost thirty thousand francs, the brother and sister between them would still have ten thousand francs a year. They fancied themselves very rich, bored their acquaintances to death with their talk of future splendor, and so gave the measure of their meanness, their crass ignorance, and their idiotic jealousy. The evening they were introduced to Madame Tiphaine the beauty—who had already watched them at Madame Garceland’s, at her sister-in-law’s, Madame Galardon’s, and at the elder Madame Julliard’s—the queen of Provins said in a confidential tone to Julliard junior, who remained alone with her and the President a few minutes after everyone was gone:
“You all seem to be much smitten with these Rogrons?”
“I!” said the Amadis of Provins; “they bore my mother; they overpower my wife; and when Mademoiselle Sylvie was sent, thirty years ago, as an apprentice to my father, even then he could not endure her.”
“But I have a very great mind,” said the pretty lady, putting a little foot on the bar of the fender, “to give them to understand that my drawing-room is not an inn-parlor.”
Julliard cast up his eyes to the ceiling as much as to say:
“Dear Heaven, what wit, what subtlety!”
“I wish my company to be select, and if I admit the Rogrons it will certainly not be that.”
“They have no heart, no brain, no manners,” said the President. “When after having sold thread for twenty years, as my sister did, for instance—”
“My dear, your sister would not be out of place in any drawing-room,” said Madame Tiphaine, in a parenthesis.
“If people are so stupid as to remain haberdashers to the end,” the President went on; “if they do not cast their skin; if they think that ‘Comtes de Champagne’ means ‘accounts for wine,’ as the Rogrons did this evening, they should stay at home.”
“They are noisome!” said Julliard. “You might think there was only one house in Provins. They want to crush us, and, after all, they have hardly enough to live on.”
“If it were only the brother,” said Madame Tiphaine, “we might put up with him. He is not offensive. Give him a Chinese puzzle, and he would sit quietly in a corner. It would take him the whole winter to put up one pattern. But Mademoiselle Sylvie! What a voice—like a hyena with a cold! What lobster’s claws! Do not repeat anything of this, Julliard.”
When Julliard was gone, the little
