Chapter XLI: My Marriage and Its Results 393 (2)

Olympe Lambert was tall, with a handsome figure like her mother’s; she had an olive complexion, large, velvety, and luminous eyes, a charming mouth with small teeth, a delicate nose with pink nostrils, brown hair with ruddy tints in it, handsome arms and hands, and a very small foot. It was impossible to discover a more fascinating creature to look at and one of less good-humour.

IV

BORN IN AN INN

Doctor Seron, after the death of his parents, had renewed acquaintance with one of his uncles on the maternal side, a physician in a hamlet in the department of Oise, between Verberie and Seulis. This uncle, then very old, had become a widower and, being without children, he ceded his practice to the son-in-law of his only remaining relative, and gladly welcomed the young couple in his house.

Living with his uncle, following his counsels, Jean Louis Lambert succeeded marvellously well with his new patients for three years. A son was born to them, and the young people were happy, he singing always the praise of love in his letters to his mother and father-in-law, while she “browsed” agreeably without wishing to confess it.

Doctor and Madame Seron congratulated themselves daily for the happy choice they had made in their daughter’s husband.

But misfortunes came, one after another, to the young couple. Their great-uncle died suddenly of an attack of apoplexy. Their well-beloved son, who, even at the age of eighteen months, gave proof of exceptional intelligence, died after a three days’ illness from the effects of a violent scolding from his mother, which gave him convulsions; finally, the small borough they inhabited was entirely burned down, except their grand-uncle’s house which his nephews had inherited, and which Madame Lambert, with a heroism admired by everyone, saved from the flames with a small watering-pump, in spite of the wounds she received from the burning brands.

The small borough was completely destroyed, deserted, ruined; the young physician’s patients were dispersed and captured by competition in an adjacent town. The uncle’s house was sold at a very bad bargain, the furniture given away, so to say, and, after some debts had been paid, there remained very little for the young couple, who took refuge at Verberie at the Hotel of The Three Monarchs.

The _dot_, broken into for Jean Louis Lambert’s studies, and wasted afterwards in expensive chemical experiments--he had had a laboratory built for himself--dripped away as money always dripped through the impracticable hands of Olympe’s husband.

As he was very intimate with the Decamps, Alexandre, and the painter, who lived near Verberie during the summer, Jean Louis hoped to create a position for himself in new surroundings.

A certain Doctor Bernhardt, a great chemist, who lived at Compiègne and often went to visit his friends, the Decamps, struck with the science and original views of the young physician, proposed to make him a partner in certain researches which were to bring about a discovery as extraordinary as that of the philosopher’s stone.

One fine day, influenced by the Decamps, fascinated by a sort of German Mephistopheles, he left his wife, who was expecting the birth of a child, at the Hotel of The Three Monarchs; but he was to receive a large salary and go to see her every Sunday until the time came when he could settle her in a home at Compiègne.

Madame Lambert, after her baby son’s death, had wounded her mother cruelly. The latter had scarcely seen her and her husband more than three times at Chauny in three years. She invited her to make her a visit, saying they could mourn over the child together and adding that only a mother with her affection could console a daughter for a son’s loss.

Olympe wrote to her mother that her sorrow was too dumb to be understood by her. Madame Seron, in despair at receiving such a letter, addressed one to her son-in-law; but as it was at the time when the fire took place, her letter received no direct response. Jean Louis merely related to her in full the details of the catastrophe of the small borough and of Olympe’s heroism which had saved the house, and he added unkindly, being ungrateful for the first time in his life: “Your daughter’s heroism was not expressed merely in words.” He thus accentuated the tone of his wife’s letter instead of attenuating it.

He did not wish to have any explanations with his mother-in-law, neither to have her come to his house, nor to go to hers, knowing very well that if circumstances had turned against him he was responsible for them in part from the manner in which he had mismanaged his resources.

The sale of the house, the departure for Verberie, his entering Doctor Bernhardt’s employ, all was done without a word from Jean Louis to his father and mother-in-law.

Doctor Seron heard of these things from his friend, the herbalist of Compiègne, who came to warn him about Doctor Bernhardt and to give him the most alarming information concerning him. He was worse than an impostor, living a luxurious life, and pulling wool over people’s eyes; it was said he was a swindler.

Madame Seron, on hearing this, addressed a supreme appeal to her son-in-law, enlightening him on the danger he was running, but, alas! it was too late. Jean Louis, completely hypnotised by Doctor Bernhardt, following his researches with passion, not only received no salary, but he had thrown the money received from the sale of the house and what remained of his wife’s _dot_ into Doctor Bernhardt’s crucible, which was like that of the philosopher’s stone.

I was born at the Hotel of The Three Monarchs. My father announced the happy event to my grandmother by this simple note: “Your grandchild, born on the 4th of October at five o’clock in the afternoon, is called Juliette.”

What! this granddaughter, so much dreamed of, so much desired, was there, at Verberie, not far off, and she could not run to embrace her, to take and hold her for an instant in her arms?

My grandmother did not cease weeping and my grandfather shed tears with her.

“Think, Pierre, of that little one in an inn, of Olympe, our daughter, in such a place, with, perhaps, only a partition separating her from some drunken brute making a noise. Oh! it will kill me.”

“And her husband far from her, and in his perpetual goings and comings not able to watch over our only child’s health or that of our granddaughter,” added Doctor Seron, “it is dreadful.” And, with hands clasped together, they sobbed. What was to be done?

They wrote again several times, but received only one answer as curt as it was short:

“The mother and child are well.”

A commercial traveller, a patient of my grandfather, had heard at Verberie that my father was a victim of a miserable fellow, who imposed upon him, making him work like a labourer, promising him everything under heaven, and spending every cent he possessed, and that my mother, still at Verberie, owed a large sum at the hotel and might at any moment, together with her daughter, be turned out of doors without resources.

My grandmother at these revelations wished to leave immediately for Verberie; my grandfather prevented her. He sent the commercial traveller to the proprietor of The Three Monarchs to assure him that he would be paid by Madame Lambert’s parents, but that he must say nothing of it to her, and must, on no account, acquaint her husband about it.

On the commercial traveller’s return my grandmother had all the details she desired, some of which were lamentable, others consoling.

My mother nursed me herself. I was a very healthy baby, but Madame Lambert, suffering from poverty and cold, for she often deprived herself of fire, the commercial traveller said, was evidently losing her health. But the hotel proprietor, reassured about his debt, would arrange things so that the young mother should suffer no longer.

My grandfather loved his daughter Olympe more than did my grandmother, because she resembled his own mother. She was submissive to her husband to the point of sacrificing her child to her wifely duties, and therefore he suffered about his child as well as his grandchild, while my grandmother suffered especially on my account.

Again, my grandmother wished to leave to come to us, but her husband calmed her with his oft-repeated words:

“You will only upset her, and, as she is nursing her child, she will give her fever and you will kill her. Wait at least for nine months, and then you can wean Juliette, and we will decide what to do according to circumstances.”

Hour by hour, day by day, week by week, the nine months, sadly counted, passed at last. At the end of the ninth month the commercial traveller received a letter from the proprietor of The Three Monarchs, saying that my father had gone to Brussels with Doctor Bernhardt, who went there ostensibly to make some final experiments, in reality to escape legal prosecution by flight, and that my mother and I were abandoned.

As soon as this letter was communicated to my grandparents there was no longer any hesitation, and my grandmother left for Verberie.

My mother, clad in a worn-out gown, was shivering over a small fire of shavings, thin, pale, her handsome face grown more sombre than ever. She welcomed her mother with a violent scene, but my grandmother had come with prepared resolutions which nothing could move.

“You have not the right, through fidelity to I know not what wifely duty and which your husband, it seems to me, is far from reciprocating, to live here in this wretchedness, and, above all, to impose it on your child. You shall leave this hotel to-morrow and return to your parents, and your husband, when he desires to do so, can come to find you as well at their home as here in this inn.”

“Where you have tied the goat she must browse,” she replied.

My grandmother, exasperated at these words, exclaimed: “Your husband doesn’t even give you grass to browse on.”

My mother remained obstinate with her habitual sourness, her bad temper, and her motiveless recriminations which she tried, as usual, to combine together, in order to prove that she was made unhappy by everyone.

“But, if you are turned out of doors with your daughter, where will you go?”

“Into the street, and Jean Louis will have the responsibility of having put me there. I do not wish that he should be absolved for his conduct by any one.”

It was therefore in order to prove her husband’s wrong-doing that she suffered abandonment and privations.

My grandmother said nothing more; but she arranged in her mind a plan for carrying me off.

“Whatever you decide,” she said, after the scene was over, “you must pay your debts, if you have any here. Do you wish me to give you some money?”

“Willingly.”

“Well, about how much do you think you owe?”

My mother named a sum.

“I am going to unpack my bag, have my dinner served, and send you some wood, and I will return with the money you need to pay your debt.”

My grandmother often told me afterwards that she did not look at me, nor kiss me, so as not to betray her emotion.

She went to find the proprietor and arranged my carrying off with him. A berline would be ready in a moment to take my grandmother and me to the town gates. The driver of the diligence which would leave an hour after us would reserve the _coupé_ seats for us, and would pick us up at a point agreed upon between the berline-driver and himself, and we would speed, changing horses once or twice, to Chauny. The hotel proprietor was to detain my mother discussing the bill, and to keep her for an hour at least, and he promised not to furnish her with a carriage to pursue us. Besides, it was agreed that my grandmother was to give to him the money necessary for my mother to join us in a few days.

My grandmother learned from him the amount of the bill, and it was arranged that she should give my mother a little less than the amount, so that the latter should not feel justified in taking any of the money in order to follow us.

My grandmother returned to her daughter’s room, now well warmed. All was ready in her own room for departure--a nursing-bottle full of warm milk and a large shawl in which to wrap me.

Her heart, she told me later many times, beat faster than it would have done had she run off with my grandfather in her youth.

The hotel proprietor had the bill taken to Madame Lambert, and sent her word that he was ready to discuss it if she should have any observations to make concerning it. My grandmother looked at the bill and told my mother that she had not quite enough money to pay it all, being obliged to keep some for her return home, and that, on glancing at it, it seemed to her that the proprietor of The Three Monarchs had added to the actual expenses too much interest for the delay of payment.

My mother was of the same opinion, and said the sum would suffice, as she should discuss the point with the proprietor, and no doubt obtain a reduction.

“Go,” said my grandmother in an indifferent tone. “I will take care of the child.”

Everything succeeded marvellously well, and I was carried off at the rather young age of nine months old, and weaned in a diligence.

V

MY 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 the diligence 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 he should 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, being three 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 Picard _patois_, 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. Arthémise took 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 cannot imagine 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.

VI

FIRST 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. He bowed 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 closed door. 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 the school, 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 looked older 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 them like 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 recall my 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.

VII