The poor inoffensive girl has hardly set foot in the house before her martyrdom begins.  There are terrible questions of money and economy, ambitions to be gratified, marriages to be prevented, inheritances to be turned aside:  complications of every kind.  The neighbours and friends of the Rogrons behold the long and painful sufferings of the victim with unruffled tranquillity, for their every natural instinct leads them to applaud the success of the stronger.  And at last Pierrette dies, as unhappily as she has lived; while the others all triumph—­the Rogrons, the detestable lawyer Vinet, and all those who had helped them; and the subsequent happiness of these wretches remains wholly untroubled.  Fate would even seem to smile upon them; and Balzac, carried away in spite of himself by the reality of it all, ends his story, almost regretfully, with these words:  “How the social villainies of this world would thrive under our laws if there were no God!”

We need not go to fiction for tragedies of this kind; there are many houses in which they are matters of daily occurrence.  I have borrowed this instance from Balzac’s pages because the story lay there ready to hand; the chronicle, day by day, of the triumph of injustice.  The very highest morality is served by such instances, and a great lesson is taught; and perhaps the moralists are wrong who try to weaken this lesson by finding excuses for the iniquities of fate.  Some are satisfied that God will give innocence its due reward.  Others tell us that in this case it is not the victim who has the greatest claim upon our sympathy.  And these are doubtless right, from many points of view; for little Pierrette, miserable though she was, and cruelly tormented, did yet experience joys that her tyrants never would know.  In the midst of her sorrow, she remained gentle, and tender, and loving; and therein lies greater happiness than in hiding cruelty, hatred, and selfishness beneath a smile.  It is sad to love and be unloved, but sadder still to be unable to love.  And how great is the difference between the petty, sordid desires, the grotesque delights, of the Rogrons, and the mighty longing that filled the child’s soul as she looked forward to the time when injustice at last should cease!  Little wistful Pierrette was perhaps no wiser than those about her; but before such as must bear unmerited suffering there stretches a wide horizon, which here and again takes in the joys that only the loftiest know; even as the horizon of the earth, though not seen from the mountain peak, would appear at times to be one with the corner-stone of heaven.  The injustice we commit speedily reduces us to petty, material pleasures; but, as we revel in these, we envy our victim; for our tyranny has thrown open the door to joys whereof we cannot deprive him—­joys that are wholly beyond our reach, joys that are purely spiritual.  And the door that opens wide to the victim is sealed in the tyrant’s soul; and the