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: