A few days before Brigaut’s arrival Sylvie had come suddenly upon Gouraud and Pierrette talking together.  Instantly, jealousy rushed into her heart with monastic violence.  Jealousy, eminently credulous and suspicious, is the passion in which fancy has most freedom, but for all that it does not give a person intelligence; on the contrary, it hinders them from having any; and in Sylvie’s case jealousy only filled her with fantastic ideas.  When (a few mornings later) she heard Brigaut’s ditty, she jumped to the conclusion that the man who had used the words “Madam’ le mariee,” addressing them to Pierrette, must be the colonel.  She was certain she was right, for she had noticed for a week past a change in his manners.  He was the only man who, in her solitary life, had ever paid her any attention.  Consequently she watched him with all her eyes, all her mind; and by giving herself up to hopes that were sometimes flourishing, sometimes blighted, she had brought the matter to such enormous proportions that she saw all things in a mental mirage.  To use a common but excellent expression, by dint of looking intently she saw nothing.  Alternately she repelled, admitted, and conquered the supposition of this rivalry.  She compared herself with Pierrette; she was forty-two years old, with gray hair; Pierrette was delicately fair, with eyes soft enough to warm a withered heart.  She had heard it said that men of fifty were apt to love young girls of just that kind.  Before the colonel had come regularly to the house Sylvie had heard in the Tiphaines’ salon strange stories of his life and morals.  Old maids preserve in their love-affairs the exaggerated Platonic sentiments which young girls of twenty are wont to profess; they hold to these fixed doctrines like all who have little experience of life and no personal knowledge of how great social forces modify, impair, and bring to nought such grand and noble ideas.  The mere thought of being jilted by the colonel was torture to Sylvie’s brain.  She lay in her bed going over and over her own desires, Pierrette’s conduct, and the song which had awakened her with the word “marriage.”  Like the fool she was, instead of looking through the blinds to see the lover, she opened her window without reflecting that Pierrette would hear her.  If she had had the common instinct of a spy she would have seen Brigaut, and the fatal drama then begun would never have taken place.

It was Pierrette’s duty, weak as she was, to take down the bars that closed the wooden shutters of the kitchen, which she opened and fastened back; then she opened in like manner the glass door leading from the corridor to the garden.  She took the various brooms that were used for sweeping the carpets, the dining-room, the passages and stairs, together with the other utensils, with a care and particularity which no servant, not even a Dutchwoman, gives to her work.  She hated reproof.  Happiness for her was in seeing the cold blue pallid eyes of her cousin,