“Was ever such a thing heard of as aching all over? If you were ill all over, you would be dead!” retorted Sylvie.
“You may have a pain in your chest,” said Rogron the expositor, “or in your teeth, or your head, or your feet, or your stomach, but no one ever had pains everywhere. What do you mean by ‘all over?’ Pain all over is pain nowhere. Do you know what you are doing? You are talking for talking’s sake.”
Pierrette at last never spoke, finding that her artless girlish remarks, the flowers of her opening mind, were met with commonplace retorts which her good sense told her were ridiculous.
“You are always complaining, and you eat like a fasting friar!” said Rogron.
The only person who never distressed this sweet fragile flower was the sturdy servant Adèle. Adèle always warmed the little girl’s bed, but in secret, since one evening when, being discovered in the act of thus “spoiling” her master’s heiress, she was scolded by Sylvie.
“Children must be hardened; that is the way to give them strong constitutions. Have we been any the worse for it, my brother and I?” said Sylvie. “You will make Pierrette a peeky coddle!”—une picheline, a word of the Rogron vocabulary to designate weakly and complaining persons.
The little angel’s caressing expressions were regarded as mere acting. The roses of affection that budded so fresh and lovely in this young soul, and longed to open to the day, were mercilessly crushed. Pierrette felt the hardest blows on the tenderest spots of her heart. If she tried to soften these two savage natures by her pretty ways, she was accused of expressing her tenderness out of self-interest. “Tell me plainly what you want,” Rogron would exclaim roughly; “you are certainly not coaxing me for nothing.”
Neither the sister nor the brother recognized affection, and Pierrette was all affection.
Colonel Gouraud, anxious to please Mademoiselle Rogron, declared her right in all that concerned Pierrette. Vinet no less supported the old cousins in their abuse of Pierrette; he ascribed all the reported misdeeds of this angel to the obstinacy of the Breton character, and said that no power, no strength of will, could ever conquer it. Rogron and his sister were flattered with the utmost skill by these two courtiers, who had at last succeeded in extracting from Rogron the surety money for the newspaper, the Provins Courrier, and from Sylvie five thousand francs, as a shareholder. The Colonel and Vinet now took the field. They disposed of a hundred shares at five hundred francs each to the electors who held State securities, and whom the Liberal journals filled with alarms, to farmers, and to persons who were called independent. They even extended their ramifications over the whole department, and beyond it, to some adjacent townships. Each shareholder subscribed for the paper, of course. Then the legal and other advertisements were divided between the Ruche and the Courrier. The first number contained a grandiloquent column in praise of Rogron, who was represented as the Laffitte of Provins.
As soon as the public mind found a leader, it became easy to perceive that the coming elections would be hotly contested. Madame Tiphaine was in despair.
“Unfortunately,” said she, as she read an article attacking her and Monsieur Julliard, “unfortunately, I forgot that there is always a rogue not far away from a dupe, and that folly always attracts a clever man of the fox species.”
As soon as the newspaper was to be seen for twenty leagues round, Vinet had a new coat and boots, and a decent waistcoat and trousers. He displayed the famous white hat affected by Liberals, and showed his collar and cuffs. His wife engaged a servant, and appeared dressed as became the wife of an influential man; she wore pretty caps.
Vinet, out of self-interest, was grateful. He and his friend Cournant, notary to the Liberal side, and Auffray’s opponent, became the Rogrons’ advisers, and did them two great services. The leases granted by old Rogron their father, in 1815, under unfortunate circumstances, were about to fail in. Horticulture and market-gardening had lately developed enormously in the Provins district. The pleader and the notary made it their business to effect an increase of fourteen hundred francs a year on granting the new leases. Vinet also won for them two lawsuits against two villages, relating to plantations of trees, in which the loss of five hundred poplars was involved. The money for the poplars, with the Rogrons’ savings, which for the last three years had amounted to six thousand francs deposited at compound interest, was skilfully laid out in the purchase of several plots of land. Finally, Vinet proposed and carried out the eviction of certain peasant proprietors, to whom Rogron the elder had lent money, and who had killed themselves with cultivating and manuring their land to enable them to repay it, but in vain.
Thus the damage done to the Rogrons’ capital by the reconstruction of their house was to a great extent remedied. Their estates in the immediate neighborhood of the town, chosen by their father as innkeepers know how to choose, cut up into small holdings of which the largest was less than five acres, and let to perfectly solvent tenants, themselves owners of some plots of land mortgaged to secure the farm rents, brought in at Martinmas, in November 1826, five thousand francs. The taxes were paid by the tenants, and there were no buildings to repair or insure against fire.
The brother and sister each possessed four thousand six hundred francs in the five percents; and as their selling value was above par, Vinet exhorted them to invest the money in land, promising them—seconded by the notary—that they should not lose a farthing of interest by the transfer.
By the end of this second period life was so intolerable to Pierrette—the indifference of all about her, the senseless faultfinding and lack of affection in her cousins became so virulent,
