for; boiled wine makes you happy! you
can snap your fingers at all your troubles!"

"I should be afraid to drink boiled wine at a dance," said La Pechina.

"Afraid of what?" asked Catherine. "There's not the slightest danger.
Think what lots of people there will be. All the bourgeois will be
looking at us! Ah! it is one of those days that make up for all our
misery. See it and die,--for it's enough to satisfy any one."

"If Monsieur and Madame Michaud would only take me!" cried La Pechina,
her eyes blazing.

"Ask your grandfather Niseron; you have not given him up, poor dear man,
and he'd be pleased to see you admired like a little queen. Why do you
like those Arminacs the Michauds better than your grandfather and the
Burgundians. It's bad to neglect your own people. Besides, why should
the Michauds object if your grandfather takes you to the fair? Oh! if
you knew what it is to reign over a man and put him beside himself, and
say to him, as I say to Godain, 'Go there!' and he goes, 'Do that!'
and he does it! You've got it in you, little one, to turn the head of a
bourgeois like that son of Monsieur Lupin. Monsieur Amaury took a fancy
to my sister Marie because she is fair and because he is half-afraid of
me; but he'd adore you, for ever since those people at the pavilion have
spruced you up a bit you've got the airs of an empress."

Adroitly leading the innocent heart to forget Nicolas and so put it off
its guard, Catherine distilled into the girl the insidious nectar of
compliments. Unawares, she touched a secret wound. La Pechina, without
being other than a poor peasant girl, was a specimen of alarming
precocity, like many another creature doomed to die as prematurely as it
blooms. Strange product of Burgundian and Montenegrin blood, conceived
and born amid the toils of war, the girl was doubtless in many ways
the result of her congenital circumstances. Thin, slender, brown as
a tobacco leaf, and short in stature, she nevertheless possessed
extraordinary strength,--a strength unseen by the eyes of peasants, to
whom the mysteries of the nervous system are unknown. Nerves are not
admitted into the medical rural mind.

At thirteen years of age Genevieve had completed her growth, though she
was hardly as tall as an ordinary girl of her age. Did her face owe its
topaz skin, so dark and yet so brilliant, dark in tone and brilliant in
the quality of its tissue, giving a look of age to the childish face,
to her Monteneg