The first time she went into the garden on a beautiful sunny day in November attended by all the household, Madame Auffray asked her if she was tired.
“No, now that I have no sufferings but those God sends I can bear all,” she said. “The joy of being loved gives me strength to suffer.”
That was the only time (and then vaguely) that she ever alluded to her horrible martyrdom at the Rogrons, whom she never mentioned, and of whom no one reminded her, knowing well how painful the memory must be.
“Dear Madame Auffray,” she said one day at noon on the terrace, as she gazed at the valley, warmed by a glorious sun and colored with the glowing tints of autumn, “my death in your house gives me more happiness than I have had since I left Brittany.”
Madame Auffray whispered in her sister Martener’s ear:—
“How she would have loved!”
In truth, her tones, her looks gave to her words a priceless value.
Monsieur Martener corresponded with Doctor Bianchon, and did nothing of importance without his advice. He hoped in the first place to regular the functions of nature and to draw away the abscess in the head through the ear. The more Pierrette suffered, the more he hoped. He gained some slight success at times, and that was a great triumph. For several days Pierrette’s appetite returned and enabled her to take nourishing food for which her illness had given her a repugnance; the color of her skin changed; but the condition of her head was terrible. Monsieur Martener entreated the great physician his adviser to come down. Bianchon came, stayed two days, and resolved to undertake an operation. To spare the feelings of poor Martener he went to Paris and brought back with him the celebrated Desplein. Thus the operation was performed by the greatest surgeon of ancient or modern times; but that terrible diviner said to Martener as he departed with Bianchon, his best-loved pupil:—
“Nothing but a miracle can save her. As Horace told you, caries of the bone has begun. At her age the bones are so tender.”
The operation was performed at the beginning of March, 1828. During all that month, distressed by Pierrette’s horrible sufferings, Monsieur Martener made several journeys to Paris; there he consulted Desplein and Bianchon, and even went so far as to propose to them an operation of the nature of lithotrity, which consists in passing into the head a hollow instrument by the help of which an heroic remedy can be applied to the diseased bone, to arrest the progress of the caries. Even the bold Desplein dared not attempt that high-handed surgical measure, which despair alone had suggested to Martener. When he returned home from Paris he seemed to his friends morose and gloomy. He was forced to announce on that fatal evening to the Auffrays and Madame Lorrain and to the two priests and Brigaut that science could do no more for Pierrette, whose recovery was now in God’s hands only. The consternation among them was terrible. The grandmother made a vow, and requested the priests to say a mass every morning at daybreak before Pierrette rose,—a mass at which she and Brigaut might be present.