Mère Giraud's Little Daughter

"Prut!" said Annot, her sabots clattering loudly on the brick floor as she moved more rapidly in her wrath. "Prut! Madame Giraud, indeed! There was a time, and it was but two years ago, that she was but plain Mere Giraud, and no better than the rest of us; and it seems to me, neighbors, that it is not well to show pride because one has the luck to be favored by fortune. Where, forsooth, would our 'Madame' Giraud stand if luck had not given her a daughter pretty enough to win a rich husband?"

"True, indeed!" echoed two of the gossips who were her admiring listeners. "True, beyond doubt. Where, indeed?"

But the third, a comely, fresh-skinned matron, who leaned against the door, and knitted a stout gray stocking with fast-clashing needles, did not acquiesce so readily.

"Well, well, neighbors," she said, "for my part, I do not see so much to complain of. Mere Giraud--she is still Mere Giraud to me--is as honest and kindly a soul as ever. It is not she who has called herself Madame Giraud; it is others who are foolish enough to fancy that good luck must change one's old ways. If she had had the wish to be a grand personage, would she not have left our village before this and have joined Madame Legrand in Paris. On the contrary, however, she remains in her cottage, and is as good a neighbor as ever, even though she is fond of talking of the carriages and jewels of Madame Legrand and her establishment on the Boulevard Malesherbes. In fact, I ask you, who of us would not rejoice also to be the mother of a daughter whose fortune had been so good?"

"That also is true," commented the amiable couple, nodding their white-capped heads with a sagacious air. "True, without doubt."

But Annot replied with a contemptuous shrug of her shoulders:--

"Wait until Madame Giraud is invited to visit the Boulevard Malesherbes," she said. "We have not heard that this has happened yet."

"She would' not go if she were, at least not to remain. Her heart has grown to the old place she bore her children in, and she has herself said to me most sensibly: 'Laure is young, and will learn easily the ways of the great world; I am old, and cannot; I am better at home among my neighbors.' Doubtless, however, In course of time she will pay Madame Legrand a visit at her home in Paris, or at the chateau which Monsieur Legrand of course possesses, as the rich and aristocratic always do."

"Doubtless!" said Annot, grimly; "doubtless."

Honest Jeanne Tallot passed the sneer by, and went on with stout gravity of demeanor:--

"There is only one thing for which I somewhat blamed Mere Giraud, and that is that I think she has scarcely done her duty toward Valentin. He disappointed her by being an ugly lad instead of a pretty girl, and she had not patience with him. Laure was the favorite. Whatever Laure did was right, and it was not so with the other, though I myself know that Valentin was a good lad, and tender-hearted."

"Once," put in a white cap, "I saw her beat him severely because he fell with the little girl in his arms and scratched her cheek, and it was not his fault. His foot slipped upon a stone. He was carrying the child carefully and tenderly enough. You are right in calling him a good lad, neighbor Tallot. He was a good lad,--Valentin Giraud,--and fond of his mother, notwithstanding that she was not fond of him."

"Yes," added her companion; "but it is a truth that he was a great contrast to the girl. Mon Dieu! his long limbs and awkward body, his great sad eyes and ugly face! While Laure,--was she not tall and slender and white, like a lily in a garden? And her voice was like the ringing of silver, and her eyes so soft and large. As an infant, she reminded one of the little Jesu as one sees him in the churches. No wonder that Mere Giraud fretted at the difference between the two. And Valentin was her first, and what mother does not look for great things in her first? We cannot help feeling that something must come of one's own charms if one has any, and Mere Giraud was a handsome bride. An ugly bantling seems to offer one a sort of insult, particularly at first, when one is young and vain."

"There was no more beautiful young girl than Laure Giraud at sixteen," said Jeanne Tallot.

"And none more useless," said Annot loudly. "Give me a young girl who is industrious and honest. My Margot is better provided for than Laure Giraud was before her marriage; but her hands are not white, nor is her waist but a span around. She has too much work to do. She is not a tall, white, swaying creature who is too good to churn and tend the creatures who give her food. I have heard it said that Laure would have worked if her mother had permitted it, but I don't believe it. She had not a working look. Mademoiselle Laure was too good for the labor of humble people; she must go to Paris and learn a fine, delicate trade."

"But good came of it," put in Jeanne Tallot, "It proved all the better for her."

"Let her mother thank the Virgin, then," cried Annot, contemptuously. "It might not have proved the better; 'it might have proved the worse; evil might have come of it instead of good. Who among us has not heard of such things? Did not Marie Gautier go to Paris too?"

"Ah, poor little one, indeed!" sighed the white caps.

"And in two years," added Annot, "_her_ mother died of a broken heart."

"But," said cheerful Jeanne, somewhat dryly, "Laure's mother is not dead yet, so let us congratulate ourselves that to go to Paris has brought luck to one of our number at least, and let us deal charitably with Mere Giraud, who certainly means well, and is only naturally proud of her daughter's grandeur. For my part, I can afford to rejoice with her."

She rolled up her stout stocking into a ball, and stuck her needles through it, nodding at the three women.

"I promised I would drop in and spend a few minutes with her this morning," she said; "so I will bid you good-day," and she stepped across the threshold and trudged off in the sunshine, her wooden shoes sounding bravely on the path.

It was only a little place,--St. Croix, as we shall call it for want of a better name,--a little village of one street, and of many vines, and roses, and orchards, and of much gossip. Simple people inhabited it,--simple, ignorant folk, who knew one another, and discussed one another's faults and grape-crops with equal frankness, worked hard, lived frugally, confessed regularly, and slept well. Devout people, and ignorant, who believed that the little shrines they erected in their vineyards brought blessings upon their grapes, and who knew nothing of the great world beyond, and spoke of Paris with awe, and even a shade of doubt. Living the same lives generation after generation, tilling the same crops, and praying before the same stone altar in the small, quaint church, it is not to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any one of their number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. There were those in St. Croix who had known Mere Giraud's grandfather, a slow-spoken, kindly old peasant, who had drunk his vin ordinaire, and smoked his pipe with the poorest; and there was not one who did not well know Mere Giraud herself, and who had not watched the growth of the little Laure, who had bloomed into a beauty not unlike the beauty of the white Provence roses which climbed over and around her mother's cottage door. "Mere Giraud's little daughter," she had been called, even after she grew into the wonderfully tall and wonderfully fair creature she became before she left the village, accompanying her brother Valentin to Paris.

"_Ma foi!_" said the men, "but she is truly a beauty, Mere Giraud's little daughter!"

"She should be well looked to," said the wiseacres,--"Mere Giraud's little daughter."

"There is one we must always give way before," said the best-natured among the girls, "and that one is Mere Giraud's little daughter."

The old Cure the parish took interest in her, and gave her lessons, and, as Mere Giraud would have held her strictly to them, even if she had not been tractable and studious by nature, she was better educated and more gently trained than her companions. The fact was, however, that she had not many companions. Some element in her grace and beauty seemed to separate her from the rest of her class. Village sports and festivities had little attraction for her, and, upon the whole, she seemed out of place among them. Her stature, her fair, still face, and her slow, quiet movements, suggested rather embarrassingly to the humble feasters the presence of some young princess far above them.

"_Pouf!_" said a sharp-tongued belle one day, "I have no patience with her. She is so tall, this Laure, that one must be forever looking up to her, and I, for one, do not care to be forever looking up."

The hint of refined pride in her demeanor was Mere Giraud's greatest glory.

"She is not like the rest, my Laure," she would say to her son. "One can see it in the way in which she holds her head'. She has the quiet, grave air of a great personage."

There were many who wondered that Valentin showed no jealousy or distaste at hearing his sister's praises sounded so frequently to his own detriment. There was no praise for him. The poor, fond mother's heart was too full of Laure. Her son had been a bitter disappointment to her, and, to her mind, was fitted for nothing but to make himself an adoring slave to his sister's beauty; and this, the gentle, generous fellow certainly was. He was always ready to serve her; always affectionate, always faithful; and Mere Giraud, who was blind to, or careless of, all his loving, constant labor for her own comfort, deigned to see that he did his duty toward Laure.

"He has at least the sense to appreciate her as far as he is able," she said.

So when Valentin, who had a talent for engraving, was discovered by some one who understood his genius, and could make use of it, and was offered a place in the great, gay city, Mere Giraud formed an ambitious plan. He should take Laure and find her a position also; she had the fingers of a fair magician, and could embroider marvelously. So she trusted Laure to him, and the two bade farewell to St. Croix and departed together. A month passed, and then there came a letter containing good news. Valentin was doing well, and Laure also. She had found a place in a great family where she was to embroider and wait upon a young lady. They were rich people, and were kind, and paid her well, and she was happy.

"When they first saw her, they were astonished," wrote the simple, tender Valentin. "I went with her to present herself. My employer had recommended her. There is a son who is past his youth, and who has evidently seen the world. He is aristocratic and fair, and slightly bald, but extremely handsome still. He sat holding a newspaper in his long, white fingers, and when we entered, he raised his eyes above it and looked at Laure, and I heard him exclaim under his breath, '_Mon Dieu!_ as if her beauty fairly startled him."

When the Cure, to whom the proud mother showed the letter, read this part, he did not seem as rejoiced as Mere Giraud had expected. On the contrary, he looked a little grave, and rubbed his forehead.