simple yet noble attitude, the same majesty of childhood in her
demeanor.

At eleven years of age she had the small-pox, and owed her life to the
care of Soeur Marthe. During the two months that their child was in
danger the Sauviats betrayed to the whole community the depth of their
tenderness. Sauviat no longer went about the country to sales; he
stayed in the shop, going upstairs and down to his daughter's room,
sitting up with her every night in company with his wife. His silent
anguish seemed so great that no one dared to speak to him; his
neighbors looked at him with compassion, but they only asked news of
Veronique from Soeur Marthe. During the days when the child's danger
reached a crisis, the neighbors and passers saw, for the first and
only time in Sauviat's life, tears in his eyes and rolling down his
hollow cheeks; he did not wipe them, but stood for hours as if
stupefied, not daring to go upstairs to his daughter's room, gazing
before him and seeing nothing, so oblivious of all things that any one
might have robbed him.

Veronique was saved, but her beauty perished. Her face, once
exquisitely colored with a tint in which brown and rose were
harmoniously mingled, came out from the disease with a myriad of pits
which thickened the skin, the flesh beneath it being deeply indented.
Even her forehead did not escape the ravages of the scourge; it turned
brown and looked as though it were hammered, like metal. Nothing can
be more discordant than brick tones of the skin surrounded by golden
hair; they destroy all harmony. These fissures in the tissues,
capriciously hollowed, injured the purity of the profile and the
delicacy of the lines of the face, especially that of the nose, the
Grecian form of which was lost, and that of the chin, once as