glass
door; at the other end of the path was an arbor of grape vines and a
fig-tree, beneath which stood a round table, a bench and some chairs,
painted green. Pierrette's bedroom was above the study of her new
guardian. Madame Lorrain slept in a cot beside her grandchild. From her
window Pierrette could see the whole of the glorious valley of Provins,
which she hardly knew, so seldom had she left that dreadful house of the
Rogrons. When the weather was fine she loved to drag herself, resting on
her grandmother's arm, to the vine-clad arbor. Brigaut, unable to work,
came three times a day to see his little friend; he was gnawed by a
grief which made him indifferent to life. He lay in wait like a dog
for Monsieur Martener, and followed him when he left the house. The old
grandmother, drunk with grief, had the courage to conceal her despair;
she showed her darling the smiling face she formerly wore at Pen-Hoel.
In her desire to produce that illusion in the girl's mind, she made her
a little Breton cap like the one Pierrette had worn on her first arrival
in Provins; it made the darling seem more like her childlike self; in it
she was delightful to look upon, her sweet face circled with a halo of
cambric and fluted lace. Her skin, white with the whiteness of unglazed
porcelain, her forehead, where suffering had printed the semblance of
deep thought, the purity of the lines refined by illness, the slowness
of the glances, and the occasional fixity of the eyes, made Pierrette
an almost perfect embodiment of melancholy. She was served by all with a
sort of fanaticism; she was felt to be so gentle, so tender, so loving.
Madame Martener sent her piano to her sister Madame Auffray, thinking
to amuse Pierrette who was passionately fond of music. It was a poem to
watch her listening to a theme of Weber, or Beethoven, or Herold,--her
eyes raised, her lips silent, regretting no doubt the life escaping
her. The cure Peroux and Monsieur Habert, her two religious comforters,
admired her saintly resignation. Surely the seraphic perfection of young
girls and young men marked with the hectic of death, is a wonderful fact
worthy of the attention alike of philosophers and of heedless minds.
He who has ever seen one of these sublime departures from this life can
never remain, or become, an unbeliever. Such beings exhale, as it
were, a celestial fragrance; their glances speak of God; the voices
are eloquent in the simplest words; often they ring