“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!”
“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.
