XIVSOME NEW IMPRESSIONS GAINED
I SPENT two full months at Chivres. I learned from Marguerite and aunt Constance all about the care to be given to animals, all about fruit-trees from aunt Anastasie, who also taught me how to make very pretty artificial flowers.
One of the most enjoyable hours in the day was the hour when aunt Sophie would give me a lesson in her room.
I used to sit in a pretty arm-chair, painted white and covered with some fresh pink and green material. Aunt Sophie was embroiderer, upholsterer, painter, carpenter, and locksmith all in one, and it was she who had painted and covered her arm-chairs, having first embroidered the material. We sat in similar arm-chairs, without our caps, which we took off; we chatted by the pretty table covered with books and papers, and it was I now who made the lovely nosegays of field-flowers.
Aunt Sophie placed before me a large sheet of paper, and gave me a pencil, and, every quarter of an hour, that is, four or five times during thelesson, she would say: “Sum up in a few words what you have just heard.”
It is to aunt Sophie that I owe my tendency to condense, to simplify, and to store in my memory a very closely packed supply of knowledge.
She would talk to me, too, of the Paganism of modern times and of the danger of its encroaching upon divine things. She would read me a short Latin sentence, repeating the words several times, and making me say them over mechanically; then she would explain them one by one, making of them living images, so that I was delighted with the poetical interpretations. I understood everything that she explained to me. “Juliette,” she would say, “let us look at what we can see in things, and seek for what is not visible.”
“Oh! auntie, let us look at once for what is not seen. I can find out for myself, even away from you, what is visible.”
Aunt Sophie explained to me that life exists in everything, even in what are called inanimate things. Every object had for her its own peculiar voice or sound. She taught me to distinguish, with my eyes closed, the difference between the sound of wood and of metal. She had a crystal slab on which she placed balls of various substances, andwith a little hammer she would play the strangest airs.
“If things can so speak to us,” she would say, “I am convinced that flowers look at us. They all have faces which express something, and most of them have perfumes which penetrate to our very souls. We can the more easily understand what is called the spirit within us, by smelling the perfume of a flower. I will explain that to you more fully a few years hence.”
Ah! the fairy-like, well-remembered hours I spent every morning with my aunt!
I was talking to her one day about the wind and she said: “I do not like it.”
“Why?”
“Because the voice of the wind is made up of borrowed sounds which it gathers on its way. Wind annoys me, makes me sad or puts me to sleep just like those authors who borrow ideas from others.”
I feel that I am badly expressing all that my aunt Sophie told me, that I speak less clearly and less originally than she. I was only eight years old and yet I understood all she said. She must have made herself much clearer than I can. I lived with aunt Sophie a life of dreams and a life of action at the same time. Every actionaccomplished by me when near her, seemed to have a fuller significance. If I watered a plant I seemed to be caring for it, and delivering it from the horrible pains of thirst; if I cut clover with a sickle, I seemed to be receiving a present from the earth, and felt that I must be grateful; if I plucked a ripe pear, I was easing the overloaded tree, which seemed to lean and offer it to me, and still did not let it drop. If I killed any harmful insect, I fancied I was doing, in person, the work of Hercules, and could hear around me a kind and approving murmur.
When Roussot and I sang our duet we were really having a musical discourse.
I could not stay indoors. The rain-drops, big and little, called me out.
Since my illness, a very strange thing had taken place in my young brain. I fancied that I had just been born or had been born over again. All that grandmother, who hated Nature, and thought it cruel and false, had taught me—which teaching had been already greatly counteracted by my father’s influence—had so entirely disappeared from my mind that I could not conceive how it had ever existed there.
All that grandmother believed in on this earth was love. “The passion of loving alone bringsus near to superhuman truths,” she said. “All things that can be reasoned about, and proved, and weighed, come from what is inert and material, and ought therefore to have no place in our souls. It is a kind of knowledge that may be left, like cumbersome luggage, by the side of the road, that leads us to the Beyond.”
Grandmother seemed to me at that time really to be the incarnation of what people said of her—“romantic.” I loved her just the same as before; I paid her in my heart the same tribute of affection I owed her, and which she deserved, but I was much more attracted by the minds of my father and of aunt Sophie, and felt great curiosity about them. I loved Nature as aunt Sophie loved it, and I was interested in the past history of Nature according to the Greek and Latin poets, and I suffered with my father for the misery of mankind, for the wretchedness of the poor and the unfortunate in life.
“Aunt Sophie,” I asked her once, “why is it that all that you show me which is so divine in Nature, hides from me that God who is so great and so far off, and whom grandmother taught me to adore? Why is it that I care no longer for the sufferings of ‘misunderstood souls’”—this was one of grandmother’s sayings—“and that I carea great deal more for the welfare of poor miserable wretches?”
“It is just because God is so great and so far off that you are too little to understand Him,” answered aunt Sophie. “When you are as old as I am”—she was forty-six and grandmother a little over forty-eight—“everything will find its place in your understanding, especially if the basis of what you know is built on a sure foundation. You must be able to touch with your feet the ground you walk on. Mother Goose certainly said that before I did. You must love intensely all that lives while you live. I am a child of Nature; I live in it and for it. Your father loves mankind, and wishes it to be happy, because he, himself, is so human.”
At Blérancourt I had adopted the habit of writing down in a little book a summary of the conversations I had with my father. Aunt Constance, having found the book in one of my pockets, was always teasing me about the depth of my reflections. I let her laugh, but, when in possession of my “Notes of Blérancourt” again, I added to them my “Notes of Chivres,” and the serious thoughts exchanged with aunt Sophie.
I kept this little book, written in small handwritingwhich only I could read, until I came to Paris, when, to my great regret, it was lost, but the sense of what was therein written has never left my memory.