onsieur Tiphaine's father died; his son inherited a fine estate and
sold his house in Provins to Monsieur Julliard. The sale proved to the
minds of all how little the Tiphaines thought of Provins. Vinet was
right; Vinet had been a true prophet. These things had great influence
on the question of Pierrette's guardianship.

Thus the dreadful martyrdom brutally inflicted on the poor child by
two imbecile tyrants (which led, through its consequences, to the
terrible operation of trepanning, performed by Monsieur Martener under
the advice of Doctor Bianchon),--all this horrible drama reduced to
judicial form was left to float in the vile mess called in legal
parlance the calendar. The case was made to drag through the delays
and the interminable labyrinths of the law, by the shufflings of an
unprincipled lawyer; and during all this time the calumniated girl
languished in the agony of the worst pain known to science.

Monsieur Martener, together with the Auffray family, were soon charmed
by the beauty of Pierrette's nature and the character of her old
grandmother, whose feelings, ideas, and ways bore the stamp of Roman
antiquity,--this matron of the Marais was like a woman in Plutarch.

Doctor Martener struggled bravely with death, which already grasped
its prey. From the first, Bianchon and the hospital surgeon had
considered Pierrette doomed; and there now took place between the
doctor and the disease, the former relying on Pierrette's youth, one
of those struggles which physicians alone comprehend,--the reward of
which, in case of success, is never found in the venal pay nor in the
patients themselves, but in the gentle satisfaction of conscience, in
the invisible ideal palm gathered by true artists from the contentment
which fills their soul after accomplishing a noble work. The physician
strains towards good as an artist towards beauty, each impelled by
that grand sentiment which we call virtue. This daily contest wiped
out of Doctor Martener's mind the petty irritations of that other
contest of the Tiphaines and the Vinets,--as always happens to men
when they find themselves face to face with a great and real misery to
conquer.

Monsieur Martener had begun his career in Paris; but the cruel
activity of the city and its insensibility to its masses of suffering
had shocked his gentle soul, fitted only for the quiet life of the
provinces. Moreover, he was under the yoke of his beautiful native
land. He returned to Prov