VIFIRST DAY AT SCHOOL
INSTEAD of one of my numerous pretty gowns, grandmother dressed me in a green frock which I did not like.
To my surprise my grandfather, after the barber’s departure, did not leave immediately to go to his hospital. He looked at me and kept repeating:
“Poor, dear little woman!”
I burst into tears without knowing why.
They covered my white apron with a frightful black one. It was for school. I knew what the school was; I had many big friends who went to it, I ought to have been proud to be considered a big girl, but I was in despair. I repeated, weeping: “Grandmother, I will be very good. I don’t want to go to school. Keep me with you.”
My grandfather said he thought they might very well wait until the winter was over before shutting me up in a prison.
I screamed all the louder at this word, Prison. Arthémise declared, crying herself, that I was still too young to go, that it was a murder!
“A murder! a murder!” repeated grandmother in anger. “That woman must be mad,” she said to grandfather, who in his turn called Arthémise “insolent.”
Here was another “family drama”; but they did not “make up” with each other after being angry, as they did with my parents.
“I shall send you out of the house!” said grandmother to Arthémise; “you shall make up your packages to-day, and to-morrow you shall return to Caumenchon. Leave the room!”
“You might scold her, but not send her off,” said grandfather. “That woman loves Juliette sincerely. And, do you know what I think? She is right. It is a murder. Leave the little thing to play for a year or two more, she will make all the greater progress for it later.”
“I wish her to surpass all the others at once,” replied grandmother; “and then I’d like to know what you are meddling yourself with it for? I know what I am doing. Hold your tongue.”
“Ta, ta, ta!” replied my grandfather, whose resistance always ended with those three syllables.
My grandmother took me to the school. I realised that it was an extraordinary event to which I was obliged to submit.
My friend the grocer was at his door. Hebowed to grandmother, much surprised to see her in the street “on a working-day,” and told her so. She answered that she was taking me to school for the first time.
“You want to make her a learned lady,” he replied.
The butcher’s wife was at her desk in her open shop. She, also, ran to the door astonished, and asked grandmother where I was going with my black apron—was it a punishment? “Because for you, Madame Seron, to be out with your Juliette in the street, she must have been very bad, indeed,” she added, laughing heartily.
I wanted more and more to cry again.
The large door of the school, of the prison, opened and shut behind us with a noise like thunder.
We went into a court where the large and small pupils were together. Madame Dufey, the school-mistress, appeared. She had mustaches, I thought her ugly, and she terrified me.
“I had the mother, I have the daughter now. I am delighted,” she said. But her voice seemed to roar.
My grandmother made a motion to leave me. I clung to her skirts. I implored. I rolled on the floor. I was choking, and I repeated, sobbing:
“You don’t love your grandchild any more!”
My grandmother for the first time in her life remained insensible to my sorrow. She pushed me away from her. She, who had spoiled me so greatly until then, thought the moment had come in which to be severe to excess.
“Be obedient,” she said to me, “or you shall remain here and not return home any more.”
I revolted and answered: “I will go to my parents at Blérancourt.”
Madame Dufey intervened.
“I will take her to breakfast with me and another new little pupil,” said the school-mistress; “don’t send for her until this evening.”
She carried me off in her arms, and my grandmother went away.
Nothing had ever seemed to me so frightful as this abandonment. I felt a poor, miserable, forsaken little thing. I leaned against the wall of a corridor under a bell which was ringing, and from which ear-rending noise I had not the strength to flee, although it fairly hurt my head. I was pushed by my new companions into a dark, gloomy class-room where they obliged me to sit alone on the end of a bench.
I had a fit of despair; I cried as loud as I could. I called for Arthémise and my grandfather.
An under-mistress approached me and ordered me to be quiet, and shook me severely. I did not stop crying. I defended myself, and struck her because she had used me so roughly.
They carried me upstairs to a garret and left me there, I know not for how many hours. Even yet, to-day, at my age, I recall the impression of that day and it seems to me that it lasted for an infinite time. It holds as much place in my memory as a whole year of other days which followed it.
The under-mistress came at breakfast-time. I had not ceased crying. If I had known what it was to die I should have killed myself.
“Will you hush?” said the under-mistress to me, striking me roughly. “Will you be good?”
This wicked woman seemed execrable to me, like the bad road of which my father had spoken. I told her so and the word avenged me. She was my first enemy. It was the first time that I had been beaten. I repeated, “Execrable, execrable!” She placed a piece of dry bread by my side and left me, saying:
“You shall obey.”
Madame Dufey had forgotten me, as my grandmother learned later. I have certainly never in all my life been so angry as I was at that closeddoor. I have never found people so implacable as they were to me that day.
From crying, screaming, and knocking against the door I fell down on the floor exhausted and went to sleep.
I awoke in Arthémise’s arms, who was weeping and frightened to see my swollen, tear-stained face. She had rocked me to sleep every night since I was three years old, telling me pretty stories of Caumenchon, and she kept saying now:
“They don’t love you any more, they don’t love you any more!”
Now, as I clung to Arthémise’s neck, I grew brave again and felt a great desire to return the harm they had done to me. I said to my nurse:
“Arthémise, do you love me?”
“My little one, do I love you!” she exclaimed, hugging me.
“Then Juliette wants to go to Caumenchon and you must obey her.”
She resisted. “They will say that I have stolen you and will put me in prison. I cannot, I cannot. But won’t I give a bit of my mind to your grandmother! Don’t you fear! for, if she has not killed you, it is not her fault.”
“Juliette will go to Caumenchon, then, all alone, at once,” I replied, and, as we left theschool, I slipped down from her arms, escaping her, and climbed the steps of the ramparts. When I got to the top I ran as fast as I could. Arthémise caught me, took me in her arms, and besought me to return to my grandmother, but as I got angry again, she walked off very fast in the direction of the village, carrying me.
When she grew too tired she put me down, and I ran, holding her hand, to keep up with her fast walking. It seemed to me that I was doing something great, that I was in the right and my grandmother in the wrong. Running, or in Arthémise’s arms, I did not cease repeating the two words which seemed to me the most expressive: “It is execrable, it is a murder!”
“Yes, a murder,” said Arthémise, “and they will see what they’ll see!”
We walked in the mud; it was a very dark night, and I thought, if I had not been with Arthémise, how afraid I should have been of the deep ruts in which they lost cows.
I was very, very hungry, and I thought myself a very unhappy, cruelly abandoned, but very courageous little girl.
We arrived at Caumenchon, at my nurse’s house. The door was open. A large fire burned in the hearth. Arthémise’s mother and father lookedolder than my grandmother and grandfather, but I did not dare to say so.
They were eating their soup and they rose, frightened at seeing me.
“Why have you brought the young lady here?” they exclaimed.
“They were making her unhappy.”
“Who?” said the father.
“The masters.”
“You are crazy. It is not your business, it’s not your business,” repeated her mother.
“I am hungry; will you give me a little soup?” I asked, taking on the tone of a poor little beggar girl.
The good people both served me.
“Eat, mam’zelle, all that you want,” said the mother to me.
This Caumenchon soup seemed delicious.
When I was warmed and had my fill of apples and nuts after the soup, Arthémise took me to a room with a very low ceiling and put me to bed, only half undressing me. She left a lighted tallow candle on a board, saying she would soon return to sleep with me.
The sheets were very coarse and of a grey colour. There were spider-webs and spiders that ran along the rafters; but I was not afraid of themlike a little friend with whom I played and who screamed when she saw one, even in the garden, on the trees.
In the room there were bars of wood through which the small heads of rabbits popped out and in.
My head burned a great deal; I heard a loud noise in my ears. It seemed to me that the little rabbits looked at me to ask me my history. I knelt down on my bed and said to them:
“My good rabbits, I have a grandmother who doesn’t love me.”
I do not know what the rabbits were going to answer me. I often wondered later, for at that moment I was caught up in my grandfather’s arms, who devoured me with kisses and carried me to the fire on which they had just thrown an enormous bunch of fagots.
Aided by Arthémise, he tried to dress me, but he trembled.
“Bad little girl, your grandmother is nearly wild with grief.”
“I don’t love her any more,” I cried. “I want to stay at Caumenchon, in the room with my friends the rabbits, and not leave my Arthémise.”
The old peasants both said to me with rather a severe air:
“Come, come, mam’zelle, be more reasonable.”
My grandfather answered them:
“Speak more gently to her. When I think that her brother, whom she resembles, poor little thing, died of convulsions after having been scolded by his mother—I do not wish that she should be spoken to harshly.”
“That is what I told you just now, sir,” added Arthémise, who was very red and seemed very angry, “and I have not told you half the fear I felt when I found her in that garret. I didn’t think I was speaking so truthfully this morning in calling the dragging of this poor little one to the school a murder.”
“My Juliette,” began my grandfather again, “I beg of you, let us return to Chauny. Arthémise’s papa and mamma want her to come back to our house and she will not disobey them. Ask her if she will.”
“I want to return,” said Arthémise, “if Madame regrets having turned me out like a thief.”
“She regrets it, Arthémise.”
“I will go to Chauny, yes, but never again to the school,” I said to grandfather.
“No, no, don’t worry about it.”
We left in my grandfather’s cabriolet. I was seated, well wrapped up, on my nurse’s knees. I saw the full moon for the first time. I still recallmy astonishment and the confused ideas I had about the great night-sun, so pale and so cold.
When I arrived at the house my grandmother was at the door, greatly upset. She had cried so much that I saw how great her sorrow was. She asked my pardon for all the horrible things endured by her poor little girl. She knew them all, having obtained the information while my grandfather went to Caumenchon, where he had felt sure of finding me.
“My darling, they put you in a garret! It was frightful,” said grandmother to me. “You did right to punish me; I will never torment you again as long as I live, my little one.”
I felt a certain superiority which inclined me to indulgence. I approved my own conduct. Perhaps that moment decided the way in which my character was formed.
“Juliette will always act like that when grandmother is bad,” I said, “and then she does not wish that Arthémise should ever be sent away like a thief.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” repeated grandmother, covering me with kisses. “Arthémise,” she continued, “you must tell me all that she said, all that she did. It was she, wasn’t it, who wanted to go to Caumenchon and who made you take her there?”
“Yes, madame.”
“She is like me, the little love. Arthémise, promise me that you will make her some day like her school. We must furnish her head with study, it deserves it.”
“No, not furnish my head, not the school!” I cried.
“Really, Pélagie, you are mad; you keep on exciting the child, who has a fever. Have you never once thought of her brother’s death?” said grandfather, snatching me out of grandmother’s lap. “Wait until she is as strong as I am, to be able to support your exaggerations.”
Grandmother turned quite white and became very gentle.
“Arthémise, put her to bed,” she ordered in a calm voice. “You must tell me when she has gone to sleep.”
During the following days it was impossible to prevent my relating in detail my horrible experience. I talked of it, I cried over it, and they could not make me stop. Arthémise, my grandparents, my friend Charles, were all obliged to listen to the recital, and I did not become calm until I had the sure conviction that I had made those who loved me suffer, the suffering that I myself had endured. I promised my grandmother, however,that I would not relate my history to my parents at Blérancourt. Arthémise and grandmother together arranged about my going to school.
I returned there later, influenced to do so by a little friend of my own age, whom they had made me know, and who taught me how to amuse myself with pictures of the letters of the alphabet.