adame Rogron's salon was
always full.

Sustained by the influence of his mother-in-law and the bankers du
Tillet and Nucingen, Monsieur Tiphaine was fortunate enough to do some
service to the administration; he became one of its chief orators, was
made judge in the civil courts, and obtained the appointment of his
nephew Lesourd to his own vacant place as president of the court of
Provins. This appointment greatly annoyed Desfondrilles. The Keeper of
the Seals sent down one of his own proteges to fill Lesourd's place.
The promotion of Monsieur Tiphaine and his translation to Paris
were therefore of no benefit at all to the Vinet party; but Vinet
nevertheless made a clever use of the result. He had always told the
Provins people that they were being used as a stepping-stone to raise
the crafty Madame Tiphaine into grandeur; Tiphaine himself had tricked
them; Madame Tiphaine despised both Provins and its people in her
heart, and would never return there again. Just at this crisis Monsieur
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, on