d into
her heart with monastic violence. Jealousy, eminently credulous and
suspicious, is the passion in which fancy has most freedom, but for all
that it does not give a person intelligence; on the contrary, it hinders
them from having any; and in Sylvie's case jealousy only filled her with
fantastic ideas. When (a few mornings later) she heard Brigaut's ditty,
she jumped to the conclusion that the man who had used the words "Madam'
le mariee," addressing them to Pierrette, must be the colonel. She was
certain she was right, for she had noticed for a week past a change in
his manners. He was the only man who, in her solitary life, had ever
paid her any attention. Consequently she watched him with all her eyes,
all her mind; and by giving herself up to hopes that were sometimes
flourishing, sometimes blighted, she had brought the matter to such
enormous proportions that she saw all things in a mental mirage. To use
a common but excellent expression, by dint of looking intently she
saw nothing. Alternately she repelled, admitted, and conquered the
supposition of this rivalry. She compared herself with Pierrette; she
was forty-two years old, with gray hair; Pierrette was delicately fair,
with eyes soft enough to warm a withered heart. She had heard it said
that men of fifty were apt to love young girls of just that kind. Before
the colonel had come regularly to the house Sylvie had heard in the
Tiphaines' salon strange stories of his life and morals. Old maids
preserve in their love-affairs the exaggerated Platonic sentiments which
young girls of twenty are wont to profess; they hold to these fixed
doctrines like all who have little experience of life and no personal
knowledge of how great social forces modify, impair, and bring to nought
such grand and noble ideas. The mere thought of being jilted by the
colonel was torture to Sylvie's brain. She lay in her bed going over
and over her own desires, Pierrette's conduct, and the song which had
awakened her with the word "marriage." Like the fool she was, instead
of looking through the blinds to see the lover, she opened her window
without reflecting that Pierrette would hear her. If she had had the
common instinct of a spy she would have seen Brigaut, and the fatal
drama then begun would never have taken place.

It was Pierrette's duty, weak as she was, to take down the bars that
closed the wooden shutters of the kitchen, which she opened and fastened
back; then she opened