who suffered from anæmia, had need of cold douches, and the doctor
ordered her to go and take them by the side of the mill-wheel. Cold
baths were excellent for me, and I took one every day in the pretty
wash-house of the close, so my aunt Constance took me with her every
afternoon. She was as gay and as much of a child as I, and we would
amuse ourselves so much that we laughed till we cried. The bathing hour
at the mill became a regular frolic, and aunt Anastasie, seduced by
my descriptions of it, came with us once or twice and finally always
accompanied us. Soon the miller’s wife joined our party, and then
Marguerite. Aunt Sophie alone resisted. She had not left the house or
the close for twenty years. Great-grandmother moved with difficulty
from her arm-chair, so there was no hope of bringing her, and, besides,
one of her daughters was always obliged to stay with her.
Roussot, therefore, alone remained to be asked to join us, and I
invited him one day after breakfast, when he had his daily bread, by a
well-turned speech intermingled with songs.
While we were laughing, Roussot answered, if not my speech at least my
song, and we concluded he had accepted the invitation.
That afternoon Marguerite led him by the bridle into the little river.
I was mounted on him and was going to take my plunge from his back; but
the bath made him so merry that he threw me off disrespectfully into
the water. He even dared to kick about and splashed us all over so much
that we could not see clearly enough to drive him out of the water.
We laughed more that day than on any other, but we did not propose,
however, to try again the experience of a bath in company with Roussot
the next day, for he was really too free and easy in his manners.
The two months spent with my aunts seemed like two weeks. I had never
until then fully realised how rapidly time can pass.
But my annual visit to Chivres was so dear to me, it had become such
a joy in my life, that I should have thought myself wrong to have
sorrowed over its short duration.
XIX
I BEGIN MY LITERARY WORK
I do not know whether it was from my aunt Sophie’s influence, or my
contact with nature, living amid it, or whether it was the slow,
clever training of my mind by my father, that made my brain swarm with
poetical, mythological, and classical images. I dreamed in turn of
Homer and of Virgil, whom I called his great-nephew, in order to give
him the same degree of relationship to Homer as that which I possessed
towards aunt Sophie.
In September and October of that year, after I had returned to Chauny,
I thought I had become a poet. I wrote rhymes about everything I saw:
the sun, the moon, the heavens, birds, flowers, fruit, and even about
the vegetables in my large garden at Chauny, in which I lived all day
during the last months of my vacation.
I confided with trembling my first “poem” to grandmother, and she
criticised it with deep emotion. I criticised it myself later with
extreme humiliation and contrition. I was already a well-instructed
girl, and I might have done far better, but my grandparents found this
poetry so beautiful that they read and re-read it to all comers, and
grandfather took it with him to his club.
The idea of writing some day most certainly came to me at this time,
for I did not cease to cover paper with verses and prose from that day.
I said to myself what was a curious thing for a girl of my age to
think: that one must feel deep emotion in order to write and to move
others, and I sought all manner of pretexts to arouse my emotions.
There was at the end of our large garden, at the foot of a very high
wall, a plot of currant-bushes, too much in the shade to yield much
fruit; so they were allowed to grow at will, mixed with raspberry
bushes and brambles.
I had a circular place made for me in this underwood. I carried some
garden chairs and a table to it, and I called this corner “my temple
of verdure.” No one but myself was allowed to enjoy it. I lived there,
during my vacations, from breakfast to dinner-time, dreaming, when the
weather permitted, and, above all, telling myself stories in which I
took extreme delight.
I put so much emotion into my voice that it made my heart ache. I
would often cry bitterly over the unhappiness, the sufferings, the
vicissitudes of the misery I invented.
I can hear myself even to-day, and see myself sitting amongst my
brambles, with the shadow of the high wall falling upon me, and
beginning my story in this wise:
“There was once upon a time a poor little boy,”--or little girl, or
a poor animal, chosen from among those I loved the best, whom I made
most unhappy on account of this or that, and my sorrow for them always
increased, for I had no pity, either for my own feelings or for those
of my heroes. Their sufferings became so poignant that I sobbed.
How many victims I invented! The distant noise of the garden gate,
announcing Arthémise coming to call me to dinner, alone decided me to
make my victims happy, especially if they had been obliged to suffer
privations. I could not have gone to the table and carried with me the
anguish of letting them die of hunger!
After some days of this sorrowful exercise, I selected the story which
seemed to me the most touching and dramatic; I put it into rhyme or
wrote it in prose on a large sheet of paper in my best handwriting to
read to grandmother.
On Sundays, as soon as vespers were over, I shut myself up in my
room and composed a review of the week’s events. This composition
was a bargain between my grandparents and myself. They gave me a
cake made of puff-paste called frangipane, which I loved, and which
grandfather went to get himself at the confectioner’s at dinner-time,
so as to have it hot, and cooked to the right degree. I regaled my
dear “ancestors”--this was the new name I bestowed upon them--with my
writings, and they regaled me with frangipane, cut into three parts.
Ah! if I had never had other hearers and readers save my grandparents,
how much criticism would have been spared me, and how much enthusiastic
success I would have had! No public, no admirers were ever so convinced
as they that they were listening to _chefs d’œuvres_.
My friend Charles, the professor, often invited to our table on
Sundays, was obliged to proffer his share of praise. He did so most
willingly, for his affection for me blinded him. How many times did I
hear him say:
“There is something of worth in what that child writes; she will make
her mark.”
My grandmother drank in my praise as if it were the nectar of the gods.
Was my friend Charles half sincere? I believed so, but another person,
a newcomer, who soon took possession of all our hearts, was surely and
entirely so.
His name was Monsieur Blondeau. He was a State Recorder, and had taken
an apartment on the ground floor of our house, on the opposite side
of the hall from us, which looked out on our blossoming courtyard and
the street at once. His apartment comprised an office, a drawing-room,
bedroom, and kitchen, and on the first story a room for his old
servant, who served him as maid-of-all-work.
Blondeau--I never called him Monsieur from the first week after his
arrival--was an old bachelor, very ugly, his face all seamed and
scarred, because when he was a child this same old servant had let him
fall out of a high window on a heap of stones; but his kindness, his
constant desire to devote himself to others and to be useful to them,
to love them, and to make himself beloved, made him adorable.
I soon gave him the title of friend, and, as he was tired of _table
d’hôte_ life, and, as his old servant, whom he had brought with him
from Lons-le-Saulnier, was capable only of cooking his breakfast
passably well, I obtained grandmother’s permission to have him dine
with us every evening, knowing it was his dream and ambition. He was
another one fanatically devoted to me--rather let me say, one of my
slaves.
Although he had much work to do, having no clerk, I enlisted him to
aid me in doing my arithmetic exercises and in copying out my week’s
compositions. He read admirably, far better than grandmother, and he
became my habitual reader.
It would not have been strange had I been persuaded by all these
flattering opinions that my talents, which Blondeau said “grew as fast
as grass,” surpassed those of all known prodigies.
Even my father, who was a lettered man, and whose good taste should
have enlightened him concerning his daughter’s lucubrations, considered
my writings marvellous.
But my mother, with her usual lack of indulgence, rendered me the
service of sobering me regarding all this praise. She put things in
their proper place, even exaggerating them in a contrary sense. She
declared that what I wrote was inept, and that they would make me a
mediocre person by fostering in me a phenomenal pride.
I alone was not vexed with her. She helped me to criticise myself,
although sometimes I thought her criticisms as excessive as the
admiration of my flatterers was exaggerated.
Having a sufficient company at home on Sundays, my friend Charles
included, I determined to put my weekly reviews into dialogues. Each
one of us read his personal pages in turn, or we replied to one
another.
When I think of all I made my grandparents and Blondeau read and say, I
am abashed. Moreover, everyone kept the name I had given him, and the
character of the rôle assigned to him, throughout the evening. They
allowed themselves to be questioned by me, and answered “attentively,”
as my friend Charles said. Had they at least been amused with this
child’s play, it would have been tolerable, but on the contrary, they
were obliged to rediscuss the weekly discussions, the wherefores of the
most subtle questions I had laid before myself, which must often have
been rare nonsense and silliness.
My heart is full of gratitude and tenderness for my four sufferers,
and, as these recollections bring them before me, perhaps I love them
to-day even more than I did at that time.
XX
LOUIS NAPOLEON’S FLIGHT FROM PRISON
My godmother Camille, of whom I was very fond, and whom I used to
visit every Thursday at the glass manufactory at Saint-Gobain--not
to amuse myself, but to talk with her, for she conversed with me on
serious subjects--had left Chauny two years previously, but she came
every two or three months to pass a week with us. She lived at Ham,
where my godfather was the manager of a sugar-refinery. She was very
intimate with Prince Louis Napoleon, and my grandfather joked with her
frequently about the honour of having inspired a Napoleon--and, he
doubted not, a future Emperor--with “a sentiment” for her, and he went,
moreover, himself to assure the Pretender about his hope of seeing him
an Emperor some day.
It annoyed my grandfather to hear that this Bonaparte was called a
socialist. But he declared that it could not be--it was a calumny.
My godmother repeated to my grandfather something that the “Prince” had
said to her before he wrote it, and which she thought admirable:
“With the name I bear, I must have either the gloom of a prison-cell,
or the light of power.”
“We shall have him one day for Emperor,” said my grandfather. It
was from his lips that I heard for the first time: “We shall have
Napoleon,” which was so often repeated later.
“But the Republic is his ideal,” said my godmother, who knew by heart
everything that Louis Napoleon wrote. “He does not know whether France
is ‘republican or not, but he will aid the people, if he is called to
power, to find a governmental form embodying the principles of the
Revolution.’ Those are his exact words,” said my godmother. She added:
“He formulates his ambition thus:
“‘I wish to group around my name the partisans of the People’s
Sovereignty.’”
“You are crazy about your Prince, Camille,” answered my grandmother,
“and you see him with the prestige of all you feel for his
misfortunes--as a prisoner, coupled with the greatness of his name. But
was there ever a more ridiculous pretender? Remember his rash attempt
at Boulogne, with his three-cornered hat, the sword of Austerlitz, and
the tamed eagle. He is grotesque.”
If my father came while Camille was with us he was much amused at my
grandfather’s exasperation when he and Camille would declare that
Louis Napoleon was more of a socialist than themselves, for had he not
written:
“What I wish is to give to thirty-five millions of Frenchmen the
education, the moral training, the competency which, until now, has
been the appanage only of the minority.”
“The proof that he is a socialist,” added my father, “is that one of
our party, Elie Sorin, swears by him; he is always saying to me: ‘Louis
Napoleon is not a Pretender in our eyes, but a member of our party, a
soldier under our flag. The Napoleon of to-day, a captive, personifies
the grief of the people, in irons like himself.’”
Sometimes my grandfather, after having been angry, laughed at this kind
of talk.
“He is a sly fellow,” he replied. “He is making fools of you all. A
Bonaparte is made to be an Emperor, you will see, and we shall have
Napoleon!”
My godmother adored my grandmother, and she should have been her
daughter instead of my mother. They wrote to each other every week and
sympathised on all subjects. My grandmother, apropos of Camille, put on
mysterious airs even in my presence. They were constantly whispering
secrets together, especially since my godmother lived at Ham.
One day I unintentionally surprised them with a boot placed on
grandmother’s work-table, at which they were gazing with tender eyes.
They looked so droll contemplating this boot that I could not help
asking to what fairy prince this precious thing had belonged?
My godmother answered:
“To Prince Louis.”
“Did you steal it from him, godmother, to keep as a relic?”
“He gave it to me.”
“His boot?”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“For a bouquet-holder.”
I burst out laughing.
“But look, dear scoffer, how small it is. Can you not understand that
he is vain of it?”
“Ah! no, to send a bouquet in his boot is not good manners. Has he worn
it, or is it new?”
“He has worn it, of course. If he had not, it would be a boot like any
other boot. But he has worn it, Juliette, he has worn it!”
And my godmother reassumed the admiring air she had worn when I entered
the drawing-room.
“Really, godmother, I must tell you that you seem to me to be a little
crazy!”
One day our Camille arrived suddenly from Ham in a state of
extraordinary agitation.
She threw herself on grandmother’s neck, where she remained a long
while, sobbing. She whispered in her friend’s ear, who uttered many
exclamations, many “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” intermingled with: “Camille, how
happy you must be!” alternating with “Camille, how unhappy you are!”
Blondeau and I were present at this scene, of which, of course, we
understood absolutely nothing.
My grandfather arrived. There were the same whisperings in his ear, the
same exclamations, the same embraces, and again: “Camille, how happy
you must be! Camille, how unhappy you are!”
“May the Supreme Being be blessed!” suddenly exclaimed my grandfather,
in a solemn tone, for he never invoked the Supreme Being except on
stormy days, when the thunder recalled the noise of cannon.
Something phenomenal was certainly happening. Not being curious, I had
great respect for secrets, especially as my family kept few from me. I
did not try to discover this secret, therefore, but I could not help
thinking that some important person had been saved after great peril,
and, strangely, that my godmother was at once happy and unhappy about
it.
After dinner I said to Blondeau:
“Does this mystery interest you? Are you trying to understand something
about it?”
“I understand it perfectly,” he replied.
“What is it?”
“_Parbleu!_ it is that the Prince, who is cracked about your crazy
godmother” (Blondeau was an Orléanist, of my grandfather’s way of
thinking), “has escaped from prison. I think she has helped him in his
flight, and that, as she adores him and is now separated from him,
she must feel, as your grandparents say, at once very happy and very
unhappy; that is all the mystery.”
The next morning at breakfast they foolishly continued to keep up their
mysterious airs before me; so I said to my godmother, Blondeau not
being present:
“Why do you try to hide what everyone knows,--that Prince Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte has escaped from his prison at Ham?”
“How can it be known already? When was it discovered?” exclaimed my
godmother. “He had just escaped when I left yesterday afternoon, and
they could not have known it before evening.”
“Tell me the beginning of the story, godmother,” said I, “since I know
the end.”
She hesitated.
My grandmother, happy at having a chance to relate an adventure, asked
Camille if she would allow her to tell it to me.
Godmother made a sign of assent.
“Well, imagine that Prince Louis pretended to be ill, and to have need
of taking a purge, and shut himself up in his room.”
“Oh! grandmother, that is not poetical,” I interrupted.
“Be quiet! you must think of the end pursued and achieved. Well, then,
as some workmen for several days had been going in and coming out of
the citadel making repairs, he cut his beard and disguised himself as a
carpenter, and passed out before the guard with a plank of wood on his
shoulder.”
“Grandmother, don’t you think it rather commonplace for a prince to
disguise himself as a carpenter?”
“I think it very clever of him to have got the better of his jailers,
in spite of all their surveillance. Doctor Conneau, who had been set
free several months previously, arranged and prepared it all, aided by
Camille. Yesterday he drove out of the town in a tilbury with your
godmother, who got out and hid herself at a certain point, and gave
her place to the prince, who had doffed his workman’s clothes; and
with well-prepared relays, Doctor Conneau and the Prince reached the
frontier. Meanwhile your godmother came to us in a carriage she had
hired at a village, after having walked a long way.”
Was the Prince saved? No one knew as yet, since no one except Blondeau,
who knew nothing about it, had spoken of it. However, at dinner,
Blondeau absolved me of my untruth, by announcing that he had heard
that morning of the Prince’s successful escape.
“All the same,” he added, as I had previously said, “to disguise one’s
self as a carpenter is not irreproachable good form.”
“A Napoleon elevates every one of his acts. A Bonaparte could not
remain the prisoner of an Orléans,” replied my grandfather. “He has
escaped. That is everything.”
“The romantic part of it,” added my grandmother, “lies in the fact that
he has escaped from his jailers, that his prison doors, so strongly
barred, have been opened by a stratagem that no one foresaw nor
discovered. It is those who imprisoned him--I regret to say it--who
have been tricked and made ridiculous. I love King Louis Philippe,
as Camille knows, more than this Bonaparte, who seems to me in his
character of pretender a plotter and an intriguer. But as a man, from
all Camille has told me of him, I confess he is charming; and as he was
her friend, I think she did right in aiding him in his flight. If I had
been in her place I would not have hesitated either.”
My godmother remained with us for a fortnight, but was not consoled for
the absence of her Prince, for I saw her weeping more than once.
XXI
MY 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 discovered that 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 thick _sabots_, 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 become mad, 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. I have 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.