Pierrette, the first of the Bachelors, is the martyrdom of a child delivered to the cruelty of bourgeois relatives. At Provins, young Pierrette Lorrain, a poor but loving Breton orphan, is taken in by her cousins, the brother and sister Rogron — Sylvie and Jérôme — retired haberdashers, petty, vain, dry beings devoid of heart. Under the pretext of charity, they exploit the child, overwhelm her with household labor, deprive her of affection, and mistreat her with a growing harshness all the more odious for wearing the outward show of respectability. The Rogron house is also the theater of the small town's political intrigues, where liberals and royalists clash and make use of the naive proprietors for their maneuvers. Pierrette is loved by a faithful young Breton, Jacques Brigaut, a courageous workman who has come to find her and would tear her from her tormentors. But the child's health, ruined by ill-treatment, privation, and neglect, declines rapidly; a late and clumsy medical intervention finishes destroying her. Pierrette dies, an innocent victim of her relatives' wickedness and of provincial selfishness, without true justice being rendered to her memory. Balzac draws an indictment of the cold cruelty of embittered, childless bachelors, whose poverty of heart unleashes itself on a weak being. The novel also denounces the hypocrisy of a society that veils these domestic persecutions in respectability. By its pathos and its social charge, Pierrette is among the darkest works of the cycle, and its heroine embodies innocence crushed by selfishness. It is a pitiless study of the provinces and of the ordinary perversity that boredom and emotional sterility can nourish.