ets of which stuck out at the hips,--the jacket of blue cloth
which is classic in Brittany; there, too, were the waistcoat of printed
cotton, the linen shirt fastened by a gold heart, the large rolling
collar, the earrings, the stout shoes, the trousers of blue-gray
drilling unevenly colored by the various lengths of the warp,--in short,
all those humble, strong, and durable things which make the apparel of
the Breton peasantry. The big buttons of white horn which fastened the
jacket made the girl's heart beat. When she saw the bunch of broom her
eyes filled with tears; then a dreadful fear drove back into her heart
the happy memories that were budding there. She thought her cousin
sleeping in the room beneath her might have heard the noise she made in
jumping out of bed and running to the window. The fear was just; the old
maid was coming, and she made Brigaut the terrified sign which the lad
obeyed without the least understanding it. Such instinctive submission
to a girl's bidding shows one of those innocent and absolute affections
which appear from century to century on this earth, where they blossom,
like the aloes of Isola Bella, twice or thrice in a hundred years.
Whoever had seen the lad as he ran away would have loved the ingenuous
chivalry of his most ingenuous feeling.

Jacques Brigaut was worthy of Pierrette Lorrain, who was just fifteen.
Two children! Pierrette could not keep from crying as she watched his
flight in the terror her gesture had conveyed to him. Then she sat down
in a shabby armchair placed before a little table above which hung a
mirror. She rested her elbows on the table, put her head in her hands,
and sat thinking for an hour, calling to memory the Marais, the village
of Pen-Hoel, the perilous voyages on a pond in a boat untied for
her from an old willow by little Jacques; then the old faces of her
grandfather and grandmother, the sufferings of her mother, and the
handsome face of Major Brigaut,--in short, the whole of her careless
childhood. It was all a dream, a luminous joy on the gloomy background
of the present.

Her beautiful chestnut hair escaped in disorder from her cap, rumpled in
sleep,--a cambric cap with ruffles, which she had made herself. On
each side of her forehead were little ringlets escaping from gray
curl-papers. From the back of her head hung a heavy braid of hair that
was half unplaited. The excessive whiteness of her face betrayed
that terrible malady of girlhood whic