Next morning he awoke feeling sour-tempered and low-spirited.
"Well, my boy," his father asked him, blowing noisily at each
spoonful of soup he absorbed, "well, did you enjoy yourself
yesterday?"
He answered curtly and crossly. Everything stirred his gorge.
His aunt's print gown filled him with a sort of rage.
His father propounded a hundred minute inquiries; he would fain
have pictured the whole expedition to himself as he consumed his
bowl of soup. He had seen Saint-Cloud in his soldiering days;
but he had never been there since. He had a bright idea; they
would go to Versailles, the three of them; his sister would see
to having a bit of veal cooked overnight, and they could take
it with them. They would have a look at the pictures, eat their
snack on the great lawn, and have a fine time generally.
Jean, who was horrified at the whole project, opened his
exercise-books and buried his head in his lessons, to avoid the
necessity of hearing any more and answering questions. He did not
as a rule show such alacrity about setting to work. His father
remarked on the fact, commending him for his zeal.
"We should play," he announced, "when it is play-time, and work
when it is the time to work," and _he_ set to work flattening
a piece of shagreen.
Jean fell into a brown study. He had caught a glimpse of a world
he knew to be for ever closed against him, but towards which
all the forces of his young heart drew him irresistibly. He did
not dream Madame Ewans could ever be different from what he had
seen her. He could not imagine her otherwise dressed or amid any
other surroundings. He knew nothing whatever of women; this one
had seemed motherly to him, and it was a mother such as Madame
Ewans he would have liked to have. But how his heart beat and
his brow burned as he pictured this imaginary mother a reality!
Dating from the day at Saint-Cloud, Jean thought himself unhappy,
and unhappy he became in fact. He was wilfully, deliberately
insubordinate, proud of breaking rules and defying punishments.
He and his school-mates attended the classes of a _Lycée_ in
the _Quartier Latin_. Directly he had taken his place on the
remotest bench in the well-warmed lecture-room, he would become
absorbed in some sentimental novel concealed under piles of
Latin and Greek authors. Sometimes the master, short-sighted as
he was, would catch the culprit in the act.
Still, Jean had his hours of triumph. His translations were
remarkable, not for accuracy, but at any rate for elegance. So,
too, his compositions sometimes contained happy phrases that
earned him high praise. On the theme, "The maiden Theano defending
Alcibiades against the incensed Athenians," he wrote a Latin
oration that was warmly commended by Monsieur Duruy, the then
Inspector of Public Instruction, and gained the young author
some weeks of scholastic fame.
On holidays he would roam the boulevards and gaze with greedy
eyes at the jewels, the silks and satins, the bronzes, the
photographs of women, displayed in the shop-windows--the thousand
and one gewgaws and frivolities of fashion that seemed to him
to sum up the necessary conditions of happiness.
His entry into the philosophy class was a red-letter day; he
sported his first tall hat and smoked his first non-surreptitious
cigarettes. He possessed a certain brilliancy of mind and a keen
wit that amused his companions, whose superior he was in gifts
of imagination.
His last vacation was passed in tolerable content. His father,
thinking him looking pale, sent him on a visit to relatives living
in a village near Chartres. Jean, the tedious farm dinner ended,
would go and sit under a tree and bury himself in a novel.
Occasionally he would ride to the city in the miller's cart.
Often he would be drenched all the way by the rain that fell
drearily at nightfall. Then he would enjoy the fun of drying
himself before the huge fireplace of some inn on the outskirts
of the town, beside the savoury roast on the turning spit. He
even had a day's shooting with an old flint-lock fowling-piece
under the auspices of his cousin the miller. In short, he could
boast on his return of having had a country holiday.