“My brother was home for his holidays—­do you remember now, Monsieur Parisel?  He had just been appointed second head clerk, was reckoning on still further speedy advancement, and was bursting with pride.  He was harder and more inexorable than the two old people towards me, poor forsaken girl as I was, although they had never left their home.  He spoke about his future, which would be compromised, of the disgrace which would fall on all the family, went into a rage, arid pitied neither my tears nor my prayers, and treated me with the cruelty of a hangman.

“And they sent me a long way off, like a servant who has committed a theft, and condemned me to be confined at a farm in a village, where the peasants treated me harshly.  The child died, but the mother lived through everything.

“One does not have good luck very frequently, confound it, and the only thing that I could do was to return evil, to strike at the coward whom I hated, to dishonor and to lower his name, to stick to the fellow who strutted about in his uniform, and who had won the game, from garrison to garrison, as if I had been vermin.  That is why I, of my own accord, came to this house, where one belongs to everybody, and have become almost more vicious than any of the other girls, and why I have told you this unentertaining story.

“I say, you fellows, who will pay ten francs for the bandmaster’s sister?  Upon my honor, you will not regret your money!”

His comrades got Parisel out of the house.  He resisted for a week, but then sold everything he had, borrowed the money to pay Lucie’s debts, and tried in vain to free himself from that weight, and to get her expelled from the town, but she always returned.  She was as implacable towards him as a gerfalcon that is devouring its prey, and as the adventure had got wind, and was even talked about at the soldiers’ mess, and as the scandal increased every day, the colonel forced the bandmaster to resign.

When Lucie heard the news, she looked vexed, and, said spitefully: 

“I had hoped that he would have blown his brains out!”

FALSE ALARM

“I have a perfect horror of pianos,” Fremecourt said, “of those hateful boxes that fill up a drawing-room, and which have not even the soft sound and the queer shape of the mahogany or veneered spinets, to which our grandmothers sighed out exquisite, long-forgotten ballads, and allowed their fingers to run over the keys, while around them there floated a delicate odor of powder and muslin, and some little Abbe or other turned over the leaves, and was continually making mistakes, as he was looking at the patches close to the lips on the white skin of the player instead of at the music.

“I wish there were a tax upon them, or that some evening, during a riot, the people would make huge bonfires of them, which would illuminate the whole town.  They simply exasperate me, and affect my nerves, and make me think of the tortures those poor girls must suffer, who are condemned not to stir for hours, but to keep on constantly strumming away at the chromatic scales and monotonous arpeggios, and to have no other object in life except to win a prize at the Conservatoire.