VMY EARLY CHILDHOOD
I WAS pleased, it seems, with the voyage and with the nursing-bottle. Warmly wrapped up, I slept in my grandmother’s arms. In the morning everything I saw from the diligence windows amused me greatly. The movement delighted me and made me dance. Every time I asked, “Mamma?” my grandmother answered: “Yes, look, see, she is down there.” At the relays I walked a little, for I already walked at that early age, and was much taken with and curious about the dogs, the chickens, and people, and was instinctively drawn to my grandmother, whom I soon grew to love fondly.
My mother, informed by a letter which my grandmother had left for her, of my being carried off, did not hasten to join us, but grandmother knew by frequent letters from the hotel-keeper at Verberie that she was taking care of herself and did not suffer, and that, moreover, she had written several letters to her husband and had received no answers.
Finally my mother decided one day to take thediligence and come to us, after having borrowed a sum strictly necessary for her voyage.
The large drawing-room at Chauny, with its high chimney-place, where a great wood fire burned constantly, seemed more pleasant to me than the gloomy room of The Three Monarchs, and I expressed my admiration for all that it contained by throwing kisses to the fire, to the clock, and above all to my grandparents. I had room in which to trot and amuse myself, and I took an interest in everything in this large room where they received visitors, where they dined and lived. I heard a great many things which I repeated and understood. My mother did not cease to complain about the education my grandparents were giving me and on the airs of “a trained dog,” that I was assuming, but she did not succeed in troubling the cordial understanding between us four—my grandparents, my nurse Arthémise, and myself.
My father, very unhappy, repenting of his foolish act, ashamed of the blind faith he had placed in a cynical impostor, had returned without a cent to his parents at Pontoise. He begged by letter for my mother, humiliated and submissive, but my grandmother replied that she would not give him back his wife until the day when heshould have made another position for himself and could prove that he had the means to support her. As to his daughter Juliette, she would never be given back to him.
“I adopt this child which you have abandoned and given over to dire poverty,” wrote my grandmother, “and she belongs to me as long as I live.”
It was at this time that my father went to live at the pretty borough of Blérancourt, three leagues from Chauny and two from Pontoise-sur-Oise, where his people dwelt. A year after he came and proved to my grandmother that he was in a position to support his wife and to fulfil the conditions she had imposed upon him before he should be allowed to take her back.
“Return and browse,” said my grandfather to his daughter, laughing, as he put a well-filled purse in her hand.
I remained, of course, with my grandparents. Neither my father nor mother would have dared at that epoch to question my staying.
It was some years after this that the long series of dramatic scenes began of which I was the cause, and which occasioned my being carried off many times.
The effort made by a matured mind to recall its early impressions is most curious. We evoke them,and they rise before us in the form of a little person whom we succeed in detaching from our present selves, but who, however, continues to remain a part of what we have become. The image, the vision of ourselves is clear and perfectly cut in our minds when we say: “When I was a child.” We see ourselves as we were at a certain age, but as soon as we particularise an event or question a fact we cannot escape from our present personality, and it is impossible to rid these facts and events from connection with it, or from their later consequences.
We should like to write of our childhood with the childish words we then used, but we cannot, and memory only suggests some striking traits, some simple phrases, which make clear the facts registered in the mind.
How many things more interesting than those we remember do we doubtless forget!
One day—it was not on a Sunday—my grandmother dressed me in a pretty white gown lined with pink and embroidered by herself with little wheels, which I had often watched her making. Later, overcome with emotion, I dressed my own daughter in this same gown.
“It is your birthday, the fourth of October, and you are three years old,” said my grandmother.
Three years! these words re-echoed in my head: there was something about them solemn and gay at once. To be grown up is a child’s ambition. Children create in their minds many surprising illusions. People said frequently to me, which made me very proud:
“She is very tall for her age. She looks five years old.” Those two figures, three and five, were the first I remembered, and I used them on every occasion. I looked at and compared myself with children smaller than I, and considered myself very tall indeed.
On this 4th of October my nurse Arthémise called me “miss” for the first time. I can hear her even now. On that day, the first that stands out distinct in my memory, everyone who saw me kissed me. I returned my grandparents’ caresses, hanging on their necks, but I remember perfectly that a number of persons made me angry by kissing me too hard. However, I allowed myself to be embraced rapturously by my nurse Arthémise, who wished to “eat me up,” as she said, and also by my great friend Charles,[A]who called me his “little wife.”
I told him with a dignified air that now, beingthree years old, he must call me his “big wife,” which he did at once, presenting me with a trumpet, on which I began to play with all my might.
My grandparents were expecting my mother and father to dine. They always arrived late, because the road across the Manicamp prairie was so bad that they related this story to children about it: “One day a cowkeeper lost a cow in one of the ruts, and he tried to find it by plunging the handle of his whip in the mud, but he could not succeed.”
One should hear this story in Picardpatois, which gives a singular force to the words, especially when the cowkeeper turns his whip-handle in the mud and cannot feel the cow, so deeply is she buried in it.
I ran every few minutes to the front door and leaned out. I was a little afraid, for the entrance, with its four steps, seemed very high to me, but I thought I should be very useful to the kitchen-folk if I could be the first to cry out: “Here they are! here they are!”
I ran about a great deal, I even fell once, to Arthémise’s great alarm, who feared I should spoil my pretty gown.
At last my parents arrived from Blérancourt.
They told a long story which I have forgotten.The cabriolet and the horse were covered with mud. Papa and mamma repeated that the road was execrable. The word struck me and I used it for a long while on all occasions.
My mother wore a dark blue silk gown, caught up under her shawl. I can see her now, undoing her skirt and shaking it. I helped her by tapping on the silk and I said admiringly: “Mamma is beautiful!”
My father took me in his arms and covered me with kisses, and he also said “that I was very, very tall, and that he had not seen me for a long time—not for three months.” That was the same number as my age, it must therefore be a long time, and papa looked so sad that he made me feel like crying. His own eyes were full of tears.
They sat down to dinner. My grandfather told stories which made them laugh, but I thought they would not laugh long, for whenever my parents came from Blérancourt they always ended by quarrelling together.
My father said suddenly:
“This time we will take Juliette home with us!”
I did not dare to say that I did not wish to go. I was much more afraid of my parents than of my grandparents.
“No, I shall keep her,” replied grandmother.
“It is more than two years since you took her from us,” continued my father. “If we still had her brother, or if she had a sister, I promise you that I would give her to you, but think, mother, I have only this little one.”
“It is not our affair, but yours, to give her a brother or sister,” my grandfather replied, laughing.
Certainly, I thought, grandfather was right. Why did not papa and mamma buy me a little sister or brother? Then they would not need to say they would take me from grandmother.
“You must give Juliette back to us,” my father repeated. “I want her.”
“Never!” cried grandfather and grandmother at once. “She belongs to us; you abandoned her.”
Then began a scene which is easy to me to recall, because it was renewed three or four times every year during my childhood. They dragged me first to one side, then to the other, they kissed me with faces wet with tears, they grew very angry with one another, and they almost made me crazy by asking and repeating: “Don’t you want to come with your papa and mamma?”—“Don’t you want to stay with your grandfather and grandmother?”
I would answer sobbing, not realising my cruelty to my father, who adored me:
“I want Arthémise, my grandmother and grandfather.”
My father was very unhappy. My mother, who was jealous of everything and everybody, suffered less, however, from my grandmother’s passion for me than for my father’s; but she naturally took her husband’s part against her parents.
On that day, as on many subsequent days, my parents from Blérancourt yielded and grew calm. My grandmother, by much show of affection and by all manner of promises, succeeded in making them leave me at Chauny.
My father said a hundred times to me: “You love your papa, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes, yes!”
And it was true. I loved my papa, but not as I loved grandmother.
“Juliette must begin her education,” added grandmother, “and she can do so only at Chauny. As soon as the vacations are over she must go to school.”
The next morning they woke me very early. I was sleepy and rebelled. What grandfather called “the family drama” had fatigued me. Arthémisetook me in her arms, half asleep, for me to say good-bye to my parents. My mother was putting on her bonnet as I entered the drawing-room, my father was wrapping her shawls about her. They got into the carriage and I waved kisses to them for good-bye.
“Above all, be good at school,” said my mother to me as she left.
One morning Arthémise carried me half asleep into the drawing-room. I wanted to be put back to bed. My grandmother said severely to me that it should not be done, that Arthémise was to dress me and that I was to go to school.
I was before the fire in the large drawing-room with its four windows, which seemed to my childish ideas immense and which has much shrunken since, and I was passed from grandmother’s lap to Arthémise’s. They dressed me, after having washed me, the which I did not like, although it amounted to but little, only my face and my hands, and grandfather did not even wish that they should “clean me” every day—they did not say “wash” in those days—water, he declared, made pimples on the face.
Ah! how that surgeon cultivated microbes! He could not have suffered much from the want of a dressing-room when in the army. One cannotimagine nowadays how little they washed themselves in our Picardy in the year of grace 1839. They soaped their faces only on Sundays in the kitchen and their hands every morning.
My grandfather, who the barber, Lafosse, shaved every morning in the drawing-room at dawn, wiped his face with the towel under his chin when it was untied, and that was all. And yet he looked clean, his white cravat and his pleated shirt-front were always perfectly immaculate, spotted over only with snuff, which he would knock off with graceful little gestures with his finger and thumb. As to my grandmother, she was always handsomely dressed and had her hair arranged every day by the barber, Lafosse.
In the rooms of the hotels of Picardy, which had been occupied by travellers, cobwebs would be found at the bottom of the water-jug long after the epoch of which I speak.