y the position and manoeuvre your forces with the same
wisdom you have displayed hitherto, and which has won us our present
position. If I get to be attorney-general you shall command the
department. Oh! if you had been an elector we should be further
advanced than we are now; I should have bought the votes of those two
clerks by threatening them with the loss of their places, and we
should have had a majority."

The colonel had long been thinking about Pierrette, but he concealed
his thoughts with the utmost dissimulation. His roughness to the child
was only a mask; but she could not understand why the man who claimed
to be her father's old comrade should usually treat her so ill, when
sometimes, if he met her alone, he would chuck her under the chin and
give her a friendly kiss. But after the conversation with Vinet
relating to Sylvie's fears of marriage Gouraud began to seek
opportunities to find Pierrette alone; the rough colonel made himself
as soft as a cat; he told her how brave her father was and what a
misfortune it had been for her that she lost him.

A few days before Brigaut's arrival Sylvie had come suddenly upon
Gouraud and Pierrette talking together. Instantly, jealousy rushed
into her heart with monastic violence. Jealousy, eminently credulous
and suspicious, is the passion in which fancy has most freedom, but
for all that it does not give a person intelligence; on the contrary,
it hinders them from having any; and in Sylvie's case jealousy only
filled her with fantastic ideas. When (a few mornings later) she heard
Brigaut's ditty, she jumped to the conclusion that the man who had
used the words "Madam' le mariee," addressing them to Pierrette, must
be the colonel. She was certain she was right, for she had noticed for
a week past a change in his manners. He was the only man who, in her
solitary life, had ever paid her any attention. Consequently she
watched him with all her eyes, all her mind; and by giving herself up
to hopes that were sometimes flourishing, sometimes blighted, she had
brought the matter to such enormous proportions that she saw all
things in a mental mirage. To use a common but excellent expression,
by dint of looking intently she saw nothing. Alternately she repelled,
admitted, and conquered the supposition of this rivalry. She compared
herself with Pierrette; she was forty-two years old, with gray hair;
Pierrette was delicately fair, with eyes soft enough to warm a
withered heart.