“You can save her only by a miracle. As Horace has told you, necrosis has set in. At that age the bones are still so tender.”
The operation was performed early in March 1828. All that month Monsieur Martener, alarmed by the fearful torments Pierrette endured, made several journeys to Paris; he consulted Desplein and Bianchon, to whom he even suggested a treatment resembling that known as lithotrity—the insertion of a tubular instrument into the skull, by which a heroic remedy might be introduced to arrest the progress of decay. The daring Desplein dared not attempt this surgical feat, which only despair had suggested to Martener.
When the doctor returned from his last journey to Paris, his friends thought-him crestfallen and gloomy. One fatal evening he was compelled to announce to the Auffray family, to Madame Lorrain, to the confessor, and to Brigaut, who were all present, that science could do no more for Pierrette, that her life was in the hands of God alone. Her grandmother took a vow and begged the curé to say, every morning at daybreak, before Pierrette rose, a mass which she and Brigaut would attend.
The case came up for trial. While the Rogrons’ victim lay dying, Vinet was calumniating her to the Court. The, Court ratified the decision of the family council, and the lawyer immediately appealed. The newly-appointed public prosecutor delivered an address which led to an inquiry. Rogron and his sister were obliged to find sureties to avoid being sent to prison. The inquiry necessitated the examination of Pierrette herself. When Monsieur Desfondrilles went to the Auffrays’ house, Pierrette was actually dying; the priest was at her bedside, and she was about to take the last sacrament. At that moment she was entreating all the assembled family to forgive her cousins as she herself forgave them, saying, with excellent good sense, that judgment in such cases belonged to God alone.
“Grandmother,” said she, “leave all you possess to Brigaut”—Brigaut melted into tears—“and,” Pierrette went on, “give a thousand francs to good Adèle, who used to warm my bed on the sly. If she had stayed with my cousins, I should be alive …”
It was at three o’clock on Easter Tuesday, on a beautiful day, that this little angel ceased to suffer. Her heroic grandmother insisted on sitting by her all night with the priests, and sewing her winding-sheet on her with her old hands. Towards evening Brigaut left the house and went back to Frappier’s.
“I need not ask you the news, my poor boy,” said the carpenter.
“Père Frappier—yes; it is all over with her, and not with me!”
The apprentice looked round the workshop at all the wood store with gloomy but keen eyes.
“I understand, Brigaut,” said the worthy Frappier. “There—that is what you want,” and he pointed, to some two-inch oak planks.
“Do not help me, Monsieur Frappier,” said the Breton. “I will do it all myself.”
Brigaut spent the night in planing and joining Pierrette’s coffin, and more than once he ripped off with one stroke a long shaving wet with his tears. His friend Frappier smoked and watched him. He said nothing to him but these few words when his man put the four sides together:
“Make the lid to slide in a groove, then her poor friends will not hear you nail it down.”
At daybreak Brigaut went for lead to line the coffin. By a singular coincidence the sheets of lead cost exactly the sum he had given to Pierrette for her journey from Nantes to Provins. The brave Breton, who had borne up under the dreadful pain of making a coffin for the beloved companion of his childhood, overlaying each funereal board with all his memories, could not endure this coincidence; he turned faint, and could not carry the lead; the plumber accompanied him, and offered to go with him and solder down the top sheet as soon as the body should be laid in the coffin.
The Breton burned his plane and all the tools he had used for the work, he wound up his accounts with Frappier, and bade him goodbye.
The heroism which enabled the poor fellow, like the grandmother, to busy himself with doing the last services to the dead, led to his intervening in the crowning scene which put a climax to the Rogrons’ tyranny.
Brigaut and the plumber arrived at Monsieur Auffray’s just in time to decide by brute force a horrible and shameful legal question. The chamber of the dead was full of people, and presented a strange scene to the two workmen. The Rogrons stood hideous by the victim’s corpse to torture it even in death. The body of the poor girl, sublime in its beauty, lay on her grandmother’s camp-bed. Pierrette’s eyes were closed, her hair smoothly braided, her body sewn into a winding-sheet of coarse cotton.
By this bed, her hair in disorder, on her knees with outstretched hands and a flaming face, old Madame Lorrain was crying out:
“No, no; it shall never be!”
At the foot of the bed were the guardian Monsieur Auffray, the Curé Monsieur Péroux, and Monsieur Habert. Tapers were still burning. Opposite the grandmother stood the hospital surgeon and Monsieur Néraud, supported by the smooth-tongued and formidable Vinet. A registrar was present. The surgeon had on his dissecting apron; one of his assistants had opened his roll of instruments and was handing him a scalpel.
This scene was disturbed by the noise made by the fall of the coffin, which Brigaut and the plumber dropped; and by Brigaut himself, who, entering first, was seized with horror on seeing old Madame Lorrain in tears.
“What is the matter?” asked Brigaut, placing himself by her side, and convulsively clutching a chisel he had brought with him.
“The matter!” said the old woman. “They want to open my child’s body, to split her skull—to rend her heart after her death as they did in her lifetime!”
“Who?” said Brigaut, in a voice to crack the drum of the lawyer’s ears.
“The Rogrons.”
“By the God above us!—”
“One moment,
