Page:Repertory of the Comedie Humaine.djvu/437

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War Department in 1841. For thirty years a comrade of Baron Hulot. At this time he enlightened his friend on the administrative situation, which was seriously endangered at the time he asked for an appointment for his sub-chief, Marneffe. This advancement was not merited, but became possible through the dismissal of Coquet, the chief of bureau. (Cousin Betty)

ROGRON, Provins tavern-keeper in the last half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. He was at first a carter, and married the daughter of M. Auffray, a Provins grocer, by his first wife. When his father-in-law died, Rogron bought his house from the widow for a song, retired from business and lived there with his wife. He possessed about two thousand francs in rentals, obtained from twenty-seven pieces of land and the interest on the twenty thousand francs raised by the sale of his tavern. Having become in his old age a selfish, avaricious drunkard and shrewd as a Swiss tavern-keeper, he reared coarsely and without affection the two children, Sylvie and Jerome-Denis, whom he had by his wife. He died, in 1822, a widower. (Pierrette)

ROGRON (Madame), wife of the preceding; daughter, by his first wife, of M. Auffray, a Provins grocer; paternal aunt of Madame Lorrain, the mother of Pierrette; born in 1743; very homely; married at the age of sixteen; left her husband a widower. (Pierrette)

ROGRON (Sylvie), elder child of the preceding; born between 1780 and 1785 at Provins; sent to the country to be nursed. When thirteen years old she was placed in a store on rue Saint-Denis, Paris. When twenty years old she was second clerk in a silk-store, the Ver Chinois, and towards the end of 1815, bought with her own savings and those of her brother the property of the Soeur de Famille, one of the best retail haberdasher's establishments and then kept by Madame Guenee. Sylvie and Jerome-Denis, partners in this establishment, retired to Provins in 1823. They lived there in their father's house, he having been dead several months,