"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