XXIMY FIRST GREAT SORROW
NOTHING in particular happened to occupy or disturb my life until the winter of 1847. Things repeated themselves monotonously. The collisions between my relatives were multiplied, the divergence between their reciprocal opinions became more and more intensified. My grandmother became somewhat embittered, and occasionally blamed her dear King Louis Philippe; my grandfather declared himself more certain of the future triumph of his Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He was a member of several Bonapartist committees. My father thought he was nearer to his democratic-socialist republic; my aunts mourned more and more over the imbecility of the people in believing in those who deceived them; over political immorality, and the madness of all parties.
I had at that time one of the most violent, most despairing revolts, and one of the most inconsolable sorrows of my life.
The winter was particularly cold. My large garden was filled with snow, but I had discoveredthat it still possessed beauty. My grandmother, who felt the cold severely, did not move from her room, which opened into the drawing-room, or from the drawing-room itself. She kept up a large wood fire in it, which she excelled in making.
Grandfather often said to her that she proved the untruth of the proverb which said that “one must be in love or be a philosopher to know how to make a good fire.” “Now, you are neither the one nor the other,” he added one day.
Grandmother replied:
“I am a philosopher because I bear with you, and am not angry with you in spite of all you have made me endure. I am no longer in love with you, but is it not because my passion for my husband was destroyed at a very early hour that I remain in love with love, and that I console or distract myself in reading of the romantic happiness or unhappiness of others?”
Blondeau loved the snow as much as I. Well-shod with Strasburg woollen socks and thicksabots, we would go after breakfast to make enormous heaps of snow in which we would dig galleries, or else we would mould figures with it. The trees, the plants, the borderings of box, the walled-fruit, were prettier one than the other, under their snowy garments.
Along the high wall, overtopping the trees of my temple of verdure, at the end of the garden, whose branches were all powdered with brilliant hoar-frost shining on a carpet looking like white wool, huge stalactites hung, superb and glittering. It was a fairy scene when at sunset these stalactites would light up, shining under the last rays of the sun, when drops like diamonds would hang on the extreme end of their delicate points.
“Blondeau, my dear Blondeau, look at this, look at that, how pretty, how beautiful, how splendid and brilliant it is!” I would cry.
My admiration was inexhaustible as was Blondeau’s pleasure at listening to me and seeing me so delighted, so merrily happy.
But one day in this same snowy and fairy-like garden, where everything was so dear and precious to me, Blondeau seized me by the hand and began to walk rapidly. Although I asked him what it meant, he did not answer me.
“Let us walk around the garden,” he replied to all my questions.
“Walk around it, Blondeau! We have already done so four times, and you want to begin again. Ah! no, indeed! you must tell me what is the matter with you.”
He was so agitated I was afraid he had becomemad, and I was worried more than can be imagined. My heart stood still to see him like this and I could neither breathe nor walk. I drew my hand suddenly from his, and, planting myself before him, I said:
“Speak to me, Blondeau, for I think you are crazy.”
“I wish I were,” he replied, despairingly, “so as not to make you suffer the dreadful sorrow I am going to cause you. Ah! your grandmother has given me a nice errand to perform. I was too stupid, truly, to take upon myself the duty of telling you such news. I wish I were a hundred feet underground.”
“Well, what is it, Blondeau? You are killing me!”
He seized my hand again and went around the garden almost running, then he stopped suddenly, having at last found the courage to say to me:
“Juliette, my darling child, you know that Madame Dufey has sold her boarding-school to the Demoiselles André, your mother’s friends, who knew them in the hamlet that was burned down in the first days of your parents’ marriage—the hamlet where your grandfather’s uncle lived.”
“Yes, I know, and those ladies are very nice. Ihave seen them. They told me they cherished a very dear memory of my mother, and would be happy to extend their faithful affection to her daughter. I thought the phrase very pretty and have remembered it. What sorrow do you think I can feel from them?”
Instructed by my grandmother, Blondeau had certainly prepared a long speech, but, carried away by haste after all his hesitations, he said to me in a brutal way:
“Well, your grandmother has sold the garden to the Demoiselles André to build a boarding-school in it.”
“What garden?”
“This one, ours, hers, yours!”
“You are telling an untruth!”
“Alas, I am not. Your grandmother did not dare to tell you until the contract was signed; she knew that you would beg her not to do it, and would prevent her; now the thing is irrevocable. Everything was finished this morning.”
“It is abominable. I wish to keep my trees, my temple of verdure, my brambles. I don’t want—I don’t want them to be taken from me! Blondeau, buy back my garden, you have money. We will make a house in it for our two selves; you, at least, cannot abandon me.”
And I threw myself in his arms, weeping.
It seemed to me that all my trees raised their branches heavenward, and that they wept with me under the sunshine.
What! my vines, with their bunches of muscat grapes, of which I was so fond; what! my immense apricot tree, which I had had measured and which was the largest one in Chauny, and which people came to see, with its five yards of breadth and ten yards of height; what! my box, which I had cut myself into balls and borders; was all this to be pulled up, cut, destroyed?
“Blondeau, why has grandmother caused me this great grief, for which I shall never be consoled?”
“Because she could never find such a chance again, and it is for yourdot.”
Then I burst forth.
“Oh! yes, again for money—that money which makes the misery of my life. It is like the inheritance for which mamma would have let me die! Grandmother is going to kill me that I may have adot!”
This time it was I who provoked the “family drama,” and what a drama it was! I showed myself on this occasion the passionate child of my violent-tempered father. My anger and my hardnesstowards my grandmother made her suffer terribly.
I shut myself up in my room for more than a fortnight. Arthémise brought me my meals. I would open my door only to her. Neither Blondeau, grandfather, nor my friend Charles were allowed to enter. My grandmother did not even dare to come upstairs. I wrote her every day a letter filled with cruel reproaches, to which she had not the courage to reply.
Her great fear was that my father would arrive and that I would wish to leave her forever. However, to tranquillize her on that score, there was a serious quarrel pending between herself and my father at that time, the latter having wished to borrow money from her to pay the debts of his soldier-brother, who led a wild life; and as she had refused, they had not seen each other for two months.
I thought of Blérancourt, where the garden was small, to be sure, but was separated from other gardens only by hedges, where I should have my father, who I certainly loved as much as grandmother; but my mother’s coldness, compared with grandfather’s exuberance and gaiety, frightened me. And then at Blérancourt there was no Blondeau nor friend Charles. Besides, I knew very wellthat, although my mother was jealous of grandfather’s affection for me, she would blame me for abandoning her, would say I was ungrateful, and, moreover, I could not think of explaining to her grandmother’s reason for selling the garden and her anxiety regarding mydot.
These reflections following one another in my mind, at times made me indulgent toward grandmother, but, as soon as I thought of the destruction of my garden, I suffered so acutely that I listened no longer to justice.
I thought also of asking my aunts to take me, of writing to Marguerite to come with Roussot some night, when I would give herrendezvousin the little streetdes Juifson which our garden opened, so that she could steal me away; but I had the secret instinct that if my aunts were very happy to have me two months in the year, at the time when they lived out of doors, my turbulence, my superabundance of gaiety, of life, my passion for movement, would tire them during a whole year through.
After all, there were only my grandparents, Blondeau, my friend Charles, and Arthémise to love and really understand me, and—I added to myself—to put up with me.
I had missed going to school for two weeks.
Grandmother said I was ill and it was believed, because no one saw me about.
However, grandmother finally invoked the aid of the dean, whom I liked very much, because he wished me to make my first communion when I was ten and a half years old, and not to wait another year. He feared my father’s influence over me, which fact, of course, they did not tell me, so I was very flattered to be the youngest and the most remarked in the catechism class. I was as tall as the tallest girls in it.
Grandmother told the dean the truth about my passionate love of my garden, of my extreme delight in nature, and of her sudden resolve to sell the garden on account of the exceptional price she received, and for the benefit of mydot, etc., etc.
The dean came and knocked at my door, but I did not open it, in spite of the touching appeal he made to me. I heard grandmother sobbing outside. From that moment my heart was softened and my rancour fled, but a bad feeling of pride prevented me from calling them back. I repented, however, and when Arthémise came to bring me some ink for which I had asked, I opened my door and found myself face to face with the dean.
The moment for an amiable solution had come, but in order to save my dignity I pretended to letmyself be overcome by the dean’s arguments, and to be influenced by his threats not to receive me any longer at the catechism class and to delay my first communion until the following year, in 1848.
“Come,” he said to me, “and ask your grandmother’s pardon.”
“No, your reverence, do not exact that I should ask pardon. I cannot do it. I am too unhappy to think that my grandmother has sold my garden, and that I have lost it forever. Besides, it is not necessary. You will see that my grandmother will be only too glad to kiss me.”
Grandmother was waiting for me in the drawing-room, knowing that the dean had gone into my room and having learned from Arthémise that I had listened to him and had yielded.
That night, at dinner, they had a festival in my honour without saying anything to me about my misbehaviour. It was not the time to scold me. I was not at all consoled for the loss of my garden, for my flowers and fruit, for all its greenery, or even for its snow.
I did not see the first flowers blossom, I did not gather them for grandmother’s table, nor for the little white vase in which I was wont to arrange artistically the first Bengal roses.
As soon as the fine weather came, and during all that spring, the workmen were pulling down the rampart behind the high garden-wall, and everything fell in together. They cut a new street, on which the large principal door of the school was to open. The buildings were to be raised only twenty yards from our courtyard; the green wooden lattice was at once replaced by an ugly wall.
All the noise of the demolition of the garden broke my heart. During the night, the moaning of the wind made me think that I heard the death-sighs of my trees.
One Thursday afternoon, when I was playing sadly in the courtyard, I heard a sharp cry, a whistling, and a sort of tearing apart. Something was certainly being torn up and was resisting and groaning with all its power. I felt it must be the death-torture of my apricot tree. Formerly, at this time of the year the sap would rise to the smallest twigs on its branches, and I could see its first buds. Now they were torturing it.
This uprooting of my apricot tree revived all my sorrow. Behind that odious wall its agony was taking place.
I imagined that I could see devastation endingits cruel work. They were digging up the last vestiges of the life of my trees—their roots—and they were levelling the ground. I suffered from it all so much that I was nearly ill.