Page:Repertory of the Comedie Humaine.djvu/247



GRASLIN (Pierre), born in 1775. An Auvergnat, compatriot and friend of Sauviat, whose daughter Veronique he married in 1822. He began as a bank-clerk with Grosstete & Perret, a first-class firm of the town. A man of business and a hard worker he became successor to his employers. His fortune, increased by lucky speculations with Brezac, enabled him to buy one of the finest places in the chief city of Haute-Vienne. But he was not able to win his wife's heart. His physical unattractiveness, added to by his carelessness and grinding avarice, were complicated by a domestic tyranny which soon showed itself. Thus it was that he was only the legal father of a son named Francis, but he was ignorant of this fact, for, in the capacity of juror in the Court of Assizes dealing with the fate of Tascheron, the real father of the child, he urged but in vain the acquittal of the prisoner. Two years after the boy's birth and the execution of the mother's lover, in April, 1831, Pierre Graslin died of weakness and grief. The July Revolution suddenly breaking forth had shaken his financial standing, which was regained only with an effort. It was at the time when he had brought Montegnac from the Navarreins. (The Country Parson)

GRASLIN (Madame Pierre), wife of preceding; born Veronique Sauviat, at Limoges in May, 1802; beautiful in spite of traces of small-pox; had had the spoiled though simple childhood of an only daughter. When twenty she married Pierre Graslin. Soon after marriage her ingenuous nature, romantic and refined, suffered in secret from the harsh tyranny of the man whose name she bore. Veronique, however, held aloof from the gallants who frequented her salon, especially the Vicomte de Granville. She had become the secret mistress of J.-F. Tascheron, a porcelain worker. She was on the point of eloping with him when a crime committed by him was discovered. Mme. Graslin suffered the most poignant anguish, giving birth to the child of the condemned man at the very moment when the father was led to execution. She inflicted upon herself the bitterest flagellations. She could devote herself more freely to penance after her husband'