n, Jr., or Mademoiselle Rogron, the heirs
in Paris. Out of that human interest the Treasury was able to earn sixty
centimes.

These Rogrons, toward whom the old Lorrains, though dreading to part
with their dear little granddaughter, stretched their supplicating
hands, became, in this way, and most unexpectedly, the masters of
Pierrette's destiny. It is therefore indispensable to explain both their
antecedents and their character.

II. THE ROGRONS

Pere Rogron, that innkeeper of Provins to whom old Auffray had married
his daughter by his first wife, was an individual with an inflamed face,
a veiny nose, and cheeks on which Bacchus had drawn his scarlet and
bulbous vine-marks. Though short, fat, and pot-bellied, with stout
legs and thick hands, he was gifted with the shrewdness of the Swiss
innkeepers, whom he resembled. Certainly he was not handsome, and his
wife looked like him. Never was a couple better matched. Rogron liked
good living and to be waited upon by pretty girls. He belonged to the
class of egoists whose behavior is brutal; he gave way to his vices and
did their will openly in the face of Israel. Grasping, selfish, without
decency, and always gratifying his own fancies, he devoured his earnings
until the day when his teeth failed him. Selfishness stayed by him. In
his old days he sold his inn, collected (as we have seen) all he could
of his late father-in-law's property, and went to live in the little
house in the square of Provins, bought for a trifle from the widow of
old Auffray, Pierrette's grandmother.

Rogron and his wife had about two thousand francs a year from
twenty-seven lots of land in the neighborhood of Provins, and from the
sale of their inn for twenty thousand. Old Auffray's house, though out
of repair, was inhabited just as it was by the Rogrons,--old rats
like wrack and ruin. Rogron himself took to horticulture and spent
his savings in enlarging the garden; he carried it to the river's edge
between two walls and built a sort of stone embankment across the end,
where aquatic nature, left to herself, displayed the charms of her
flora.

In the early years of their marriage the Rogrons had a son and a
daughter, both hideous; for such human beings degenerate. Put out to
nurse at a low price, these luckless children came home in due time,
after the worst of village training,--allowed to cry for hours after
their wet-nurse, who worked in the fields, leaving them shut up to
scream for