She was called stupid and dull, clumsy and awkward for mere nothings.  Incessantly abused in words, the child suffered still more from the harsh looks of her cousins.  She acquired the doltish ways of a sheep; she dared not do anything of her own impulse, for all she did was misinterpreted, misjudged, and ill-received.  In all things she awaited silently the good pleasure and the orders of her cousins, keeping her thoughts within her own mind and sheltering herself behind a passive obedience.  Her brilliant colors began to fade.  Sometimes she complained of feeling ill.  When her cousin asked, “Where?” the poor little thing, who had pains all over her, answered, “Everywhere.”

“Nonsense! who ever heard of any one suffering everywhere?” cried Sylvie.  “If you suffered everywhere you’d be dead.”

“People suffer in their chests,” said Rogron, who liked to hear himself harangue, “or they have toothache, headache, pains in their feet or stomach, but no one has pains everywhere.  What do you mean by everywhere?  I can tell you; ‘everywhere’ means nowhere.  Don’t you know what you are doing?—­you are complaining for complaining’s sake.”

Pierrette ended by total silence, seeing how all her girlish remarks, the flowers of her dawning intelligence, were replied to with ignorant commonplaces which her natural good sense told her were ridiculous.

“You complain,” said Rogron, “but you’ve got the appetite of a monk.”

The only person who did not bruise the delicate little flower was the fat servant woman, Adele.  Adele would go up and warm her bed,—­doing it on the sly after a certain evening when Sylvie had scolded her for giving that comfort to the child.

“Children should be hardened, to give them strong constitutions.  Am I and my brother the worse for it?” said Sylvie.  “You’ll make Pierrette a peakling”; this was a word in the Rogron vocabulary which meant a puny and suffering little being.

The naturally endearing ways of the angelic child were treated as dissimulation.  The fresh, pure blossoms of affection which bloomed instinctively in that young soul were pitilessly crushed.  Pierrette suffered many a cruel blow on the tender flesh of her heart.  If she tried to soften those ferocious natures by innocent, coaxing wiles they accused her of doing it with an object.  “Tell me at once what you want?” Rogron would say, brutally; “you are not coaxing me for nothing.”

Neither brother nor sister believed in affection, and Pierrette’s whole being was affection.  Colonel Gouraud, anxious to please Mademoiselle Rogron, approved of all she did about Pierrette.  Vinet also encouraged them in what they said against her.  He attributed all her so-called misdeeds to the obstinacy of the Breton character, and declared that no power, no will, could ever conquer it.  Rogron and his sister were so shrewdly flattered by the two manoeuvrers that the former agreed to go security for the “Courrier de Provins,” and the latter invested five thousand francs in the enterprise.