Monsieur Martener had begun his career in Paris; but the cruel activity of the city and its insensibility to its masses of suffering had shocked his gentle soul, fitted only for the quiet life of the provinces.  Moreover, he was under the yoke of his beautiful native land.  He returned to Provins, where he married and settled, and cared almost lovingly for the people, who were to him like a large family.  During the whole of Pierrette’s illness he was careful not to speak of her.  His reluctance to answer the questions of those who asked about her was so evident that persons soon ceased to put them.  Pierrette was to him, what indeed she truly was, a poem, mysterious, profound, vast in suffering, such as doctors find at times in their terrible experience.  He felt an admiration for this delicate young creature which he would not share with any one.

This feeling of the physician for his patient was, however, unconsciously communicated (like all true feelings) to Monsieur and Madame Auffray, whose house became, so long as Pierrette was in it, quiet and silent.  The children, who had formerly played so joyously with her, agreed among themselves with the loving grace of childhood to be neither noisy nor troublesome.  They made it a point of honor to be good because Pierrette was ill.  Monsieur Auffray’s house was in the Upper town, beneath the ruins of the Chateau, and it was built upon a sort of terrace formed by the overthrow of the old ramparts.  The occupants could have a view of the valley from the little fruit-garden enclosed by walls which overlooked the town.  The roofs of the other houses came to about the level of the lower wall of this garden.  Along the terrace ran a path, by which Monsieur Auffray’s study could be entered through a 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.