“Ah! if such an event should take place at Provins in this century or the next,” Monsieur Desfondrilles went on, “I hope that either on the little Square in the lower town, or on the castle, or somewhere in the upper town, some bas-relief will be seen representing the head of Monsieur Opoix, the rediscoverer of the mineral waters of Provins!”
“But, my dear sir, it would perhaps be impossible to rehabilitate Provins,” said old Monsieur Martener. “The town is bankrupt.”
At this Rogron opened his eyes wide, and exclaimed:
“What!”
“Provins was formerly a capital which, in the twelfth century, held its own as a rival to Paris, when the Counts of Champagne held their court here as King Rene held his in Provence,” replied the man of learning. “In those days civilization, pleasure, poetry, elegance, women—in short, all the splendor of social life was not exclusively restricted to Paris. Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin. Nothing is left to Provins but the fragrance of its historic past and that of its roses—and a sous-préfecture.”
“Oh! to think what France might be if she still had all her feudal capitals!” said Desfondrilles. “Can our sous-préfets fill the place of the poetic, gallant, and warlike race of Thibault, who made Provins what Ferrara was in Italy, what Weimar was in Germany, and what Munich would like to be in our day?”
“Provins was a capital?” asked Rogron.
“Why, where have you dropped from?” said Desfondrilles the archaeologist.
The lawyer struck the pavement of the upper town where they were standing with his stick: “Do not you know,” he cried, “that all this part of Provins is built on crypts?”
“Crypts?”
“Yes, to be sure, crypts of unaccountable loftiness and extent. They are like cathedral aisles, full of pillars.”
“Monsieur Desfondrilles is writing a great antiquarian work in which he intends to describe these singular structures,” said old Martener, seeing the lawyer mount his hobby.
Rogron came home enchanted to think that his house stood in this valley. The crypts of Provins kept him occupied for five or six days in exploring them, and for several evenings afforded a subject of conversation to the old couple. Thus Rogron generally picked up something about old Provins, about the intermarriages of the families, or some stale political news which he retailed to his sister. And a hundred times over in the course of his walk—several times even of the same person—he would ask, “Well, what is the news? What has happened lately?” When he came in he threw himself on a sofa in the drawing-room as if he were tired out, but really he was only weary of his own weight.
He got on to dinnertime by going twenty times to and fro between the drawing-room and the kitchen, looking at the clock, opening and shutting doors. So long as the brother and sister spent the evenings in other houses they got through the hours till bedtime, but after they were reduced to staying at home the evening was a desert to traverse. Sometimes people on their way home, after spending the evening out, as they crossed the little Place, heard sounds in the Rogrons’ house as if the brother were murdering the sister; they recognized them as the terrific yawns of a haberdasher driven to bay. The two machines had nothing to grind with their rusty wheels, so they creaked.
The brother talked of marrying, but with a sense of despair. He felt himself old and worn; a wife terrified him. Sylvie, who understood the need for a third person in the house, then remembered their poor cousin, for whom no one in Provins had ever inquired, for everybody supposed that little Madame Lorrain and her daughter were both dead. Sylvie Rogron never lost anything; she was too thoroughly an old maid to mislay anything, whatever it might be. She affected to have found the letter from the Lorrains so as to make it natural that she should mention Pierrette to her brother, and he was almost happy at the possibility of having a little girl about the house. Sylvie wrote to the old Lorrains in a half-business-like, half-affectionate tone, attributing the delay in her answer to the winding up of their affairs, to their move back to Provins, and settling there. She affected to be anxious to have her little cousin with her, allowing it to be understood that if Monsieur Rogron should not marry, Pierrette would some day inherit twelve thousand francs a year. It would be needful to have been, like Nebuchadnezzar, to some extent a wild beast, shut up in a cage in a beast-garden with nothing to prey on but butcher’s meat brought in by the keeper, or else a retired tradesman with no shop-clerks to nag, to imagine the impatience with which the brother and sister awaited their cousin Lorrain. Three days after the despatch of the letter they were already wondering when the child would arrive.
Sylvie discerned in her so-called generosity to her penniless cousin a means of changing the views of Provins society with regard to herself. She called on Madame Tiphaine, who had stricken them with her disapproval, and who aimed at creating an upper class at Provins, like that at Geneva, and blew the trumpet to announce the advent of her cousin Pierrette, the child of Colonel Lorrain,
