story, and this is it.

Pierrette's mother was a Demoiselle Auffray of Provins, half-sister by
the father's side of Madame Rogron, mother of the present owners of
the house.

Monsieur Auffray, her husband, had married at the age of eighteen; his
second marriage took place when he was nearly sixty-nine. By the
first, he had an only daughter, very plain, who was married at sixteen
to an innkeeper of Provins named Rogron.

By his second marriage the worthy Auffray had another daughter; but
this one was charming. There was, of course, an enormous difference in
the ages of these daughters; the one by the first marriage was fifty
years old when the second child was born. By this time the eldest,
Madame Rogron, had two grown-up children.

The youngest daughter of the old man was married at eighteen to a man
of her choice, a Breton officer named Lorrain, captain in the Imperial
Guard. Love often makes a man ambitious. The captain, anxious to rise
to a colonelcy, exchanged into a line regiment. While he, then a
major, and his wife enjoyed themselves in Paris on the allowance made
to them by Monsieur and Madame Auffray, or scoured Germany at the beck
and call of the Emperor's battles and truces, old Auffray himself
(formerly a grocer) died, at the age of eighty-eight, without having
found time to make a will. His property was administered by his
daughter, Madame Rogron, and her husband so completely in their own
interests that nothing remained for the old man's widow beyond the
house she lived in on the little square, and a few acres of land. This
widow, the mother of Madame Lorrain, was only thirty-eight at the time
of her husband's death. Like many widows, she came to the unwise
decision of remarrying. She sold the house and land to her
step-daughter, Madame Rogron, and married a young physician named
Neraud, who wasted her whole fortune. She died of grief and misery two
years later.

Thus the share of her father's property which ought to have come to
Madame Lorrain disappeared almost entirely, being reduced to the small
sum of eight thousand francs. Major Lorrain was killed at the battle
of Montereau, leaving his wife, then twenty-one years of age, with a
little daughter of fourteen months, and no other means than the
pension to which she was entitled and an eventual inheritance from her
late husband's parents, Monsieur and Madame Lorrain, retail
shopkeepers at Pen-Hoel, a village in the Vendee, situated in that
part of