Brigitte was just the knife to cut into such a nature, to which her own formed the strongest contrast.  Mademoiselle Thuillier was remarkable for her regular and correct beauty, but a beauty injured by toil which, from her very childhood, had bent her down to painful, thankless tasks, and by the secret privations she imposed upon herself in order to amass her little property.  Her complexion, early discolored, had something the tint of steel.  Her brown eyes were framed in brown; on the upper lip was a brown floss like a sort of smoke.  Her lips were thin, and her imperious forehead was surmounted by hair once black, now turning to chinchilla.  She held herself as straight as the fairest beauty; but all things else about her showed the hardiness of her life, the deadening of her natural fire, the cost of what she was!

To Brigitte, Celeste was simply a fortune to lay hold of, a future mother to rule, one more subject in her empire.  She soon reproached her for being weak, a constant word in her vocabulary, and the jealous old maid, who would strongly have resented any signs of activity in her sister-in-law, now took a savage pleasure in prodding the languid inertness of the feeble creature.  Celeste, ashamed to see her sister-in-law displaying such energy in household work, endeavored to help her, and fell ill in consequence.  Instantly, Brigitte was devoted to her, nursed her like a beloved sister, and would say, in presence of Thuillier:  “You haven’t any strength, my child; you must never do anything again.”  She showed up Celeste’s incapacity by that display of sympathy with which strength, seeming to pity weakness, finds means to boast of its own powers.

But, as all despotic natures liking to exercise their strength are full of tenderness for physical sufferings, Brigitte took such real care of her sister-in-law as to satisfy Celeste’s mother when she came to see her daughter.  After Madame Thuillier recovered, however, she called her, in Celeste’s hearing, “a helpless creature, good for nothing!” which sent the poor thing crying to her room.  When Thuillier found her there, drying her eyes, he excused her sister, saying:—­

“She is an excellent woman, but rather hasty; she loves you in her own way; she behaves just so with me.”

Celeste, remembering the maternal care of her sister-in-law during her illness, forgave the wound.  Brigitte always treated her brother as the king of the family; she exalted him to Celeste, and made him out an autocrat, a Ladislas, an infallible pope.  Madame Thuillier having lost her father and grandfather, and being well-nigh deserted by her mother, who came to see her on Thursdays only (she herself spending Sundays at Auteuil in summer), had no one left to love except her husband, and she did love him,—­in the first place, because he was her husband, and secondly, because he still remained to her “that handsome Thuillier.”  Besides, he sometimes treated her like a wife, and all these reasons together made her adore him.  He seemed to her all the more perfect because he often took up her defence and scolded his sister, not from any real interest in his wife, but for pure selfishness, and in order to have peace in the household during the very few moments that he stayed there.