Upon the second floor, above the room occupied by my poor old
grandmother, who sang the Marseillaise so constantly, in that part of
the house overlooking the yard and the gardens, lived my great-aunt
Bertha.
From her windows, across the houses and the walls covered with roses and
jasmine, one could see the ramparts of the town. They were so near to
us that their old trees were visible; and beyond them lay those great
plains of our country called prees (prairies) all so alike, and as
monotonous as the neighboring seas. From the window one also saw the
river. At full tide, when it almost overflowed its banks, it looked,
as it wound along through the green meadows, like silver lace; and the
large and small boats that passed in the far distance mounted upon this
silver thread toward the harbor and from there sailed out into the great
sea.
As this was our only glimpse of real country the windows in my aunt
Bertha's room had always a great attraction for me. Especially had
they in the evening at sunset, for from them I could watch the sun sink
mysteriously behind the prairies. Oh! those sunsets that I saw from
my aunt Bertha's windows, what ecstasy overcast with melancholy they
awakened in me! The winter sunsets seen through the closed windows were
a pale rose color. Those of summer time, upon stormy evenings, after a
hot, bright day, I contemplated from the open window, and as I did so
I would breathe in the sweet odors given out by the jasmine blossoms
growing on the wall: it seems to me that there are no such sunsets now
as there were then. When the sunsets were notably splendid and unusual,
if I was not in the room, aunt Bertha, who never missed one, would call
out hastily: “Dearie! Dearie! Come quickly!” From any corner of the
house I heard that call and understood it, and I went swift as a
hurricane and mounted the stairs four steps at a time. I mounted the
more rapidly because the stairway had already begun to fill with dread
shadows; and in the turnings and corners I saw the imaginary forms of
ghosts and monsters that at nightfall always pursued me as I ran up the
stairs.
My aunt Bertha's room, with its simple white muslin curtains, was as
modest as my grandmother's. The walls, covered with an old-fashioned
paper in vogue at the commencement of the century, were ornamented with
water colors similar to those in my grandmother's room. The picture that
I looked at most often was a pastel after Raphael of a virgin in white,
blue and rose color. The rays of the setting sun always fell upon this
picture (I have already said the hour of sunset was the time I preferred
most to be in this room). This virgin was very much like my aunt Bertha;
in spite of the great difference in their ages, one was struck with the
resemblance between the straight lines and regularity of their profiles.
On this same floor, but upon the street side, lived my other grandmother
(the one who always dressed in black) and her daughter, my aunt Claire,
the person in the house who petted me most.
Upon winter evenings, after I had been to my aunt Bertha's room to
see the sunset, it was my custom to go to them. I usually found them
together in my grandmother's room and I would seat myself near the fire
in a little chair placed there for me. But the twilight hour spent with
them was always a disturbing one. . . . After all the amusements, all
the day's running and playing, to sit in the dusk almost motionless
upon my tiny chair, with eyes wide open, uneasily watching for the least
change in the shadows, especially on that side of the room where the
door opened on the dim stairway, was very painful to me. . . . I am sure
that if my grandmother and aunt had known of the melancholy and terrors
which the twilight induced in me, they would have spared me by lighting
the lamp, but they did not know my sufferings; and it was the custom
of the aged persons by whom I was surrounded, to sit tranquilly at
nightfall in their accustomed places without having need for a lighted
lamp. As it grew darker one or the other, grandmother or aunt, would
draw her chair closer to me, and when I had that protection about me
I felt completely happy and reassured and would say: “Please tell me
stories about the Island.”
The Island, that is the Island of Oleron, was my mother's native place,
my grandmother's and aunt's also, which they had quitted twenty years
before my birth to establish themselves upon the main land. The Island,
or the least thing that came from it, had a singular charm for me.
It was quite near us, for from a garret window at the top of the house
we could, upon a very clear day, see the extreme end of its extensive
plain; it appeared a little bluish line against a still paler one which
was the arm of the ocean separating us from it. . . . To get to it we
had to take a long journey in wretched country wagons and in sailing
boats; and often our boat had to make its way there in the teeth of
a strong gale. At this time in the village of St. Pierre Oleron I had
three old aunts who lived very modestly upon the revenues of their salt
marshes (the remains of a once great inheritance), and their annual
rents which the peasants still paid with sacks of wheat. . . . When I
went to visit them at St. Pierre there was for me a certain joy, mingled
with many kinds of conflicting emotions, which I cannot explain, in
trying to picture to myself their once great station.
The Huguenot austerity of their manners, their mode of life, their house
and their furniture all belonged to a past time, to a bygone generation.
The sea surrounded and isolated us, and the wind constantly swept over
the moorland and over the great stretches of sandy beach.
My nurse was also from the Island, of a Huguenot family, which
descending from father to son had been with us for a long time; and she
would say: “At home, on the Island,” in such a way that with a wave of
emotion I understood her great homesickness for it.
We had about us a number of little articles that had come from there,
and which had places of honor in our home. We had some black pebbles
large as cannon-balls, that had been chosen from the thousands lying
on the Long-Beach because centuries of washing had polished and rounded
them exquisitely. These pebbles always played an important part every
winter evening, for with the greatest regularity the old people would
put them into the chimney-place where a wood fire blazed and crackled;
afterwards they slipped them into calico bags of a flowered pattern,
also brought from the Island, and took them to bed where they served to
keep their feet warm during the night.
In our cellar we had wooden props and firkins, and also a number of
straight elm poles for holding the washing which had been cut from the
choicest young trees in my grandmother's forest. I had the greatest
veneration for all these things. I knew that my grandmother no longer
owned the forests, nor the salt marshes, nor the vineyards; for I had
heard them say that she had sold them one at a time to put the money
into investments upon the mainland; and that an incompetent notary by
his bad investments had greatly reduced her income.
When I went to the Island and the old salt makers and vine dressers, who
had at one time worked for our family, still loyal and respectful called
me “our little master,” I knew they did so out of pure politeness and
altogether in deference to our past grandeur.
I regretted that I could not spend my life in tending the vineyards and
the harvests, the occupations of several of my ancestors. Such a life
seemed a much more desirable one to me than my own which was passed in a
house in town.
The stories of the Island that my grandmother and aunt Claire related to
me were generally of the happenings of their own childhood, a childhood
that seemed so very far away that to me it had no more reality than a
dream.
There were stories of grandfathers, long dead; of great-uncles whom I
had never known, dead also for many years. When my aunt told me their
names and described them to me I would abandon myself to reverie. There
was in particular a grandfather Samuel who had preached at the time of
the religious persecution, whom I thought an extraordinarily interesting
person.
I did not care whether the stories were different or not, and I would
ask for the same ones over and over. Often they told me stories of
journeys they had taken on the little donkeys that played such an
important part in the lives of the people of St. Pierre. They would ride
upon them to visit distant properties and vineyards; to get to these
it was often necessary to travel along the sands of the Long-Beach, and
sometimes of an evening during these expeditions terrible storms would
burst upon the travellers and compel them to take shelter for the night
in the inns and farmhouses.
And as I sat in the darkness that no longer had terrors for me, my
imagination busy with the things and peoples of other days, tinkle,
tinkle would go the dinner bell; then I rose and jumped for joy, and
we would go down to the dining-room together and find all the family
gathered there in the bright gay room: then I would run to my mother and
in an excess of emotion hide my face in her dress.