Balzac's Celibates Trilogy: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours & The Black Sheep. Honore de Balzac

threw a look at Mademoiselle Habert,—one of those glances which pass from old maid to old maid, feline and cruel.

      “Pierrette, you did see my hand,” said Sylvie fixing her eyes on the girl.

      “No, cousin.”

      “I was looking at you all,” said the deputy-judge, “and I can swear that Pierrette saw no one’s hand but the colonel’s.”

      “Pooh!” said Gouraud, alarmed, “little girls know how to slide their eyes into everything.”

      “Ah!” exclaimed Sylvie.

      “Yes,” continued Gouraud. “I dare say she looked into your hand to play you a trick. Didn’t you, little one?”

      “No,” said the truthful Breton, “I wouldn’t do such a thing; if I had, it would have been in my cousin’s interests.”

      “You know you are a story-teller and a little fool,” cried Sylvie. “After what happened this morning do you suppose I can believe a word you say? You are a—”

      Pierrette did not wait for Sylvie to finish her sentence; foreseeing a torrent of insults, she rushed away without a light and ran to her room. Sylvie turned white with anger and muttered between her teeth, “She shall pay for this!”

      “Shall you pay for the misere?” said Madame de Chargeboeuf.

      As she spoke Pierrette struck her head against the door of the passage which some one had left open.

      “Good! I’m glad of it,” cried Sylvie, as they heard the blow.

      “She must be hurt,” said Desfondrilles.

      “She deserves it,” replied Sylvie.

      “It was a bad blow,” said Mademoiselle Habert.

      Sylvie thought she might escape paying her misere if she went to see after Pierrette, but Madame de Chargeboeuf stopped her.

      “Pay us first,” she said, laughing; “you will forget it when you come back.”

      The remark, based on the old maid’s trickery and her bad faith in paying her debts at cards was approved by the others. Sylvie sat down and thought no more of Pierrette,—an indifference which surprised no one. When the game was over, about half past nine o’clock, she flung herself into an easy chair at the corner of the fireplace and did not even rise as her guests departed. The colonel was torturing her; she did not know what to think of him.

      “Men are so false!” she cried, as she went to bed.

      Pierrette had given herself a frightful blow on the head, just above the ear, at the spot where young girls part their hair when they put their “front hair” in curlpapers. The next day there was a large swelling.

      “God has punished you,” said Sylvie at the breakfast table. “You disobeyed me; you treated me with disrespect in leaving the room before I had finished my sentence; you got what you deserved.”

      “Nevertheless,” said Rogron, “she ought to put on a compress of salt and water.”

      “Oh, it is nothing at all, cousin,” said Pierrette.

      The poor child had reached a point where even such a remark seemed to her a proof of kindness.