snatched away, by her evil star, from the grandparents who adore
her, and transferred to the care of an aunt and uncle. Monsieur
Rogron and his sister Sylvia. A hard, gloomy couple, these two;
retired shopkeepers, who live in a dreary house in the back streets
of a dreary country town. Their celibacy weighs heavily upon them;
they are miserly, and absurdly vain; morose, and instinctively full
of hatred.

The poor inoffensive girl has hardly set foot in the house before
her martyrdom begins. There are terrible questions of money and
economy, ambitions to be gratified, marriages to be prevented,
inheritances to be turned aside: complications of every kind. The
neighbours and friends of the Rogrons behold the long and painful
sufferings of the victim with unruffled tranquillity, for their
every natural instinct leads them to applaud the success of the
stronger. And at last Pierrette dies, as unhappily as she has lived;
while the others all triumph--the Rogrons, the detestable lawyer
Vinet, and all those who had helped them; and the subsequent
happiness of these wretches remains wholly untroubled. Fate would
even seem to smile upon them; and Balzac, carried away in spite of
himself by the reality of it all, ends his story, almost
regretfully, with these words: "How the social villainies of this
world would thrive under our laws if there were no God!"

We need not go to fiction for tragedies of this kind; there are many
houses in which they are matters of daily occurrence. I have
borrowed this instance from Balzac's pages because the story lay
there ready to hand; the chronicle, day by day, of the triumph of
injustice. The very highest morality is served by such instances,
and a great lesson is taught; and perhaps the moralists are wrong