So, in the month of October 1824, when Pierrette had almost completed her eleventh year, she was placed in the care of the guard of the diligence from Nantes to Paris by the two old people and the young apprentice, all three dreadfully sad. The guard was requested to put her into the coach for Provins, and to take great care of her. Poor Brigaut! he ran after the diligence like a dog, looking at his dear Pierrette as long as he could. In spite of the child’s signals, he ran on for a league beyond the town, and when he was exhausted, his eyes sent a last tearful glance at Pierrette, who cried when she could see him no more. Pierrette put her head out of the window, and discerned her friend standing squarely, and watching the heavy vehicle that left him behind.
The Lorrains and Brigaut had so little knowledge of life that the little Bretonne had not a sou left when she arrived in Paris. The guard, to whom the child prattled of rich relations, paid her expenses at an inn in Paris, made the guard of the Troyes coach repay him, and desired him to deliver Pierrette to her family and collect the debt, exactly as if she were a parcel by carrier.
Four days after leaving Nantes, at about nine o’clock one Monday evening, a kind, burly old guard of the Messageries Royales took Pierrette by the hand, and, while the coach was unloading in the High Street such passengers and parcels as were to be deposited at Provins, he led her, with no luggage but two frocks, two pairs of stockings, and two shifts, to the house pointed out to him by the office clerk as that of Mademoiselle Rogron.
“Good morning, mademoiselle, and gents all,” said the guard. “I have brought you a cousin of yours, and here she be, and a pretty dear too. You have forty-seven francs to pay. Though your little girl has no weight of baggage, please to sign my way-book.”
Mademoiselle Sylvie and her brother gave way to their delight and astonishment.
“Begging your pardon,” said the guard, “my coach is waiting—sign my sheet and give me forty-seven francs and sixty centimes, and what you please for me and the guard from Nantes, for we have taken as much care of her as if she were our own. We have paid out for her bed and food, her place in the coach here, and other little things.”
“Forty-seven francs and twelve sous?” exclaimed Sylvie.
“You’re never going to beat me down?” cried the guard.
“But where is the invoice?” said Rogron.
“The invoice!—Here is my waybill.”
“You can talk afterwards, pay now!” said Sylvie to her brother; “you see, you cannot help paying.”
Rogron went to fetch forty-seven francs twelve sous.
“And nothing for us—for my pal and me?” said the guard.
Sylvie produced a two-franc piece from the depths of her old velvet bag, where her keys lurked in bunches.
“Thank you—keep it,” said the man. “We would rather have looked after the little girl for her own sake.” He took up his sheet and went out, saying to the servant girl: “A nice place this is! There are crocodiles of that sort without going to Egypt for ’em.”
“Those people are horribly coarse!” said Sylvie, who had heard his speech.
“Dame! they took care of the child,” replied Adèle, with her hands on her hips.
“We are not obliged to live with him,” said Rogron.
“Where is she to sleep?” asked the maid.
Such was the reception that met Pierrette Lorrain on her arrival at her cousins’ house, while they looked at her with a bewildered air. She was flung on their hands like a parcel, with no transition between the wretched room in which she had lived with her grandparents and her cousins’ dining-room, which struck her as palatial. She stood there mute and shy. To anyone but these retired haberdashers, the little Bretonne would have been adorable in her frock of coarse blue serge, a pink cotton apron, her blue stockings, thick shoes, and white kerchief; her little red hands were covered by knitted mittens of red wool edged with white that the guard had bought for her. Her little Brittany cap, which had been washed in Paris—it had got tumbled in the course of the journey from Nantes—really looked like a glory round her bright face. This native cap, made of fine cambric, with a stiff lace border ironed into flat pleats, deserves a description, it is so smart and so simple. The light, filtered through the muslin and lace, casts a half shadow, a twilight softness, on the face; it gives it the virginal grace which painters try to find on their palettes, and which Léopold Robert has succeeded in lending to the Raphael-like face of the woman holding a child in his picture of the Reapers. Within this setting of broken lights shone an artless rose and white face, beaming with vigorous health. The heat of the room brought the blood to her head, and it suffused the edge of her tiny ears with fire, tingeing her lips and
