“Her beauty will make her rich enough!”

CHAPTER IX

Jean-Jacques Rouget did not mourn his father, though Flore Brazier did.  The old doctor had made his son extremely unhappy, especially since he came of age, which happened in 1791; but he had given the little peasant-girl the material pleasures which are the ideal of happiness to country-folk.  When Fanchette asked Flore, after the funeral, “Well, what is to become of you, now that monsieur is dead?” Jean-Jacques’s eyes lighted up, and for the first time in his life his dull face grew animated, showed feeling, and seemed to brighten under the rays of a thought.

“Leave the room,” he said to Fanchette, who was clearing the table.

At seventeen, Flore retained that delicacy of feature and form, that distinction of beauty which attracted the doctor, and which women of the world know how to preserve, though it fades among the peasant-girls like the flowers of the field.  Nevertheless, the tendency to embonpoint, which handsome countrywomen develop when they no longer live a life of toil and hardship in the fields and in the sunshine, was already noticeable about her.  Her bust had developed.  The plump white shoulders were modelled on rich lines that harmoniously blended with those of the throat, already showing a few folds of flesh.  But the outline of the face was still faultless, and the chin delicate.

“Flore,” said Jean-Jacques, in a trembling voice, “you feel at home in this house?”

“Yes, Monsieur Jean.”

As the heir was about to make his declaration, he felt his tongue stiffen at the recollection of the dead man, just put away in his grave, and a doubt seized him as to what lengths his father’s benevolence might have gone.  Flore, who was quite unable even to suspect his simplicity of mind, looked at her future master and waited for a time, expecting Jean-Jacques to go on with what he was saying; but she finally left him without knowing what to think of such obstinate silence.  Whatever teaching the Rabouilleuse may have received from the doctor, it was many a long day before she finally understood the character of Jean-Jacques, whose history we now present in a few words.

At the death of his father, Jacques, then thirty-seven, was as timid and submissive to paternal discipline as a child of twelve years old.  That timidity ought to explain his childhood, youth, and after-life to those who are reluctant to admit the existence of such characters, or such facts as this history relates,—­though proofs of them are, alas, common everywhere, even among princes; for Sophie Dawes was taken by the last of the Condes under worse circumstances than the Rabouilleuse.  There are two species of timidity,—­the timidity of the mind, and the timidity of the nerves; a physical timidity, and a moral timidity.  The one is independent of the other.  The body may fear and tremble,