ur
hundred francs a year, interest on the little property placed in their
hands. This small sum was now applied to her maintenance. The old
people, who were growing less and less fit for business, soon found
themselves confronted by an active and capable competitor, against
whom they said hard things, all the while doing nothing to defeat him.
Major Brigaut, their friend and adviser, died six months after his
friend, the younger Madame Lorrain,--perhaps of grief, perhaps of his
wounds, of which he had received twenty-seven.

Like a sound merchant, the competitor set about ruining his
adversaries in order to get rid of all rivalry. With his connivance,
the Lorrains borrowed money on notes, which they were unable to meet,
and which drove them in their old days into bankruptcy. Pierrette's
claim upon the house in Nantes was superseded by the legal rights of
her grandmother, who enforced them to secure the daily bread of her
poor husband. The house was sold for nine thousand five hundred
francs, of which one thousand five hundred went for costs. The
remaining eight thousand came to Madame Lorain, who lived upon the
income of them in a sort of almshouse at Nantes, like that of
Sainte-Perine in Paris, called Saint-Jacques, where the two old people
had bed and board for a humble payment.

As it was impossible to keep Pierrette, their ruined little
granddaughter, with them, the old Lorrains bethought themselves of her
uncle and aunt Rogron, in Provins, to whom they wrote. These Rogrons
were dead. The letter might, therefore, have easily been lost; but if
anything here below can take the place of Providence, it is the post.
Postal spirit, incomparably above public spirit, exceeds in brilliancy
of resource and invention the ablest romance-writers. When the post
gets hold of a letter, worth, to it, from three to ten sous, and does
not immediately know where to find the person to whom that letter is
addressed, it displays a financial anxiety only to be met with in very
pertinacious creditors. The post goes and comes and ferrets through
all the eighty-six departments. Difficulties only arouse the genius of
the clerks, who may really be called men-of-letters, and who set about
to search for that unknown human being with as much ardor as the
mathematicians of the Bureau give to longitudes. They literally
ransack the whole kingdom. At the first ray of hope all the
post-offices in Paris are alert. Sometimes the receiver of a missing