The letter written by the Lorrains to Monsieur Rogron, who had been dead a year, was transmitted by the Post to Monsieur Rogron, his son, a haberdasher in the Rue Saint-Denis, Paris. This is where the genius of the Post-Office shines. An heir is always more or less puzzled to know whether he has really scraped up the whole of his inheritance, whether he has not forgotten some debt or some fragments. The Revenue guesses everything; it even reads character. A letter addressed to old Rogron of Provins was bound to pique the curiosity of Rogron junior of Paris, or of Mademoiselle Rogron, his heirs. So the Revenue earned its sixty centimes.
The Rogrons, towards whom the Lorrains held out beseeching hands though they were in despair at having to part from their granddaughter, thus became the arbiters of Pierrette Lorrain’s fate. It is indispensable, therefore, to give some account of their antecedents and their character.
Old Rogron, the innkeeper at Provins, on whom old Auffray had bestowed the child of his first marriage, was hot-faced, with a purple-veined nose, and cheeks which Bacchus had overlaid with his crimson and bulbous blossoms. Though stout, short, and potbellied, with stumpy legs and heavy hands, he had all the shrewdness of the Swiss innkeeper, resembling that race. His face remotely suggested a vast hail-stricken vineyard. Certainly he was not handsome; but his wife was like him. Never were a better matched couple. Rogron liked good living and to have pretty girls to wait on him. He was one of the sect of Egoists whose ways are brutal, and who give themselves up to their vices and do their will in the face of Israel. Greedy, mercenary, and by no means refined, obliged to be the purveyor to his own fancies, he ate up all he earned till his teeth failed him. Then avarice remained. In his old age he sold his inn, collected, as we have seen, all his father-in-law’s leavings, and retired to the little house in the Square, which he bought for a piece of bread of old Auffray’s widow, Pierrette’s grandmother.
Rogron and his wife owned about two thousand francs a year, derived from the letting of twenty-seven plots of land in the neighborhood of Provins, and the interest on the price of their inn, which they had sold for twenty thousand francs. Old Auffray’s house, though in a very bad state, was used as it was for a dwelling by the innkeepers, who avoided repairing it as they would have shunned the plague; old rats love cracks and ruins. The retired publican, taking a fancy for gardening, spent his savings in adding to his garden; he extended it to the bank of the river, making a long square shut in by two walls, and ending with a stone embankment, below which the water-plants, left to run wild, displayed their abundant flowers.
Early in their married life the Rogron couple had a son and a daughter, with two years between them; everything degenerates; their children were hideous. Put out to nurse in the country as cheaply as possible, these unhappy little ones came home with the wretched training of village life, having cried long and often for their foster-mother, who went to work in the fields, and who left them meanwhile shut up in one of the dark, damp, low rooms which form the dwelling of the French peasant. By this process the children’s features grew thick, and their voices harsh; they were far from flattering their mother’s vanity, and she tried to correct them of their bad habits by a severity which, by comparison with their father’s, seemed tenderness itself. They were left to play in the yards, stables, and outhouses of the inn, or to run about the town; they were sometimes whipped; sometimes they were sent to their grandfather Auffray, who loved them little. This injustice was one of the reasons that encouraged the Rogrons to secure a large share of the “old rascal’s” leavings. Meanwhile, however, Rogron sent his boy to school; and he paid a man, one of his carters, to save the lad from the conscription. As soon as his daughter Sylvie was twelve years old, he sent her to Paris as an apprentice in a house of business. Two years later, his son Jérôme-Denis was packed off by the same road. When his friends the carriers, who were his allies, or the inn customers asked him what he meant to do with his children, old Rogron explained his plans with a brevity which had this advantage over the statements of most fathers, that it was frank:
“When they are of an age to understand me, I shall just give them a kick you know where, saying, ‘Be off and make your fortune,’ ” he would reply, as he drank, or wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then looking at the inquirer with a knowing wink, “Ha, ha!” he would add, “they are not greater fools than I am. My father gave me
