ard. 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 it which
is called the Marais. These Lorrains, grandfather and grandmother of
Pierrette Lorrain, sold wood for building purposes, slates, tiles,
pantiles, pipes, etc. Their business, either from their own incapacity
or through ill-luck, did badly, and gave them scarcely enough to live
on. The failure of the well-known firm of Collinet at Nantes, caused
by the events of 1814 which led to a sudden fall in colonial products,
deprived them of twenty-four thousand francs which they had just
deposited with that house.

The arrival of their daughter-in-law was therefore welcome to them. Her
pension of eight hundred francs was a handsome income at Pen-Hoel. The
eight thousand francs which the widow's half-brother and sister Rogron
sent to her from her father's estate (after a multitude of legal
formalities) were placed by her in the Lorrains' business, they giving
her a mortgage on a l