by Colette
How amiable she was! What a complete changeover! This was a song from The Chalet, boring to tears. Nothing reduces my voice to a shred like singing in front of people I don’t know, so I read it correctly but in an absurdly shaky voice that became firmer, thank heavens, at the end of the piece.
‘Ah, Mademoiselle, allow me to congratulate you. You sing with such forrce!’
I protested politely, mentally sticking out my tongue (my tonngue, he’d say) at him. And I went off to find the otherrs (it’s catching) who gave me a welcome like vinegar.
‘Darling!’ the lanky Anaïs said between her teeth. ‘I hope you’re in everyone’s good books now! You must have produced a smashing impression on those gentlemen, so we shall be seeing them often.’
The Jauberts indulged in covert, sneering giggles of jealousy.
‘Let me alone, will you? Honestly, there’s nothing to foam at the mouth about because I happened to read something at sight. Rabastens is one hundred and fifty per cent a southerner and that’s a species I detest. As to Richelieu, if he comes here often, I know quite well who the attraction is.’
‘Well, who?’
‘Mademoiselle Aimée, of course! He positively devours her with his eyes.’
‘Own up,’ whispered Anaïs. ‘It’s not him you’re jealous of, so it must be her …’
That insufferable Anaïs! That girl sees everything and what she doesn’t see, she invents!
The two masters re-entered the playground; Antonin Rabastens expansive and smiling at us all, the other nervous, almost cowed. It was time they went away; the bell was on the point of ringing for the end of recreation and their urchins in the neighbouring playground were making as much noise as if the whole lot had been simultaneously plunged in a cauldron of boiling water. The bell rang for us and I said to Anaïs:
‘I say, it’s a long time since the District Superintendent came. I shall be awfully surprised if he doesn’t turn up this week.’
‘He arrived yesterday. He’s sure to come and poke his nose in here.’
Dutertre, the District Superintendent of Schools, is also the doctor to the orphanage. Most of the children there attend the school and this gives him double authorization to visit us. Heaven knows he makes enough use of it! Some people declare that Mademoiselle Sergent is his mistress. I don’t know if it’s true or not. What I am prepared to bet is that he owes her money. Electoral campaigns cost a lot and this Dutertre, who hasn’t a penny, has set his heart, in spite of persistent failure, on replacing the dumb, but immensely rich old moron who represents the voters of Fresnois in the Chambre des Députés. And I’m absolutely certain that passionate redhead is in love with him! She trembles with jealous fury when she sees him pawing us rather too insistently.
For, I repeat, he frequently honours us with his visits. He sits on the tables, behaves badly, lingers with the older ones, especially with me, reads our essays, thrusts his moustache in our ears, strokes our necks and calls us tu (he knew us when we were so high), flashing his wolf’s teeth and his black eyes. We find him extremely amiable but I know him to be such a rotter that I don’t feel in the least shy with him. And this scandalizes my schoolfriends. It was our day for the sewing-lesson. We were plying our needles lazily and talking in inaudible voices. Suddenly, to our joy, we saw white flakes beginning to fall. What luck! We should be able to make slides; there’d be lots of tumbles; we’d have snowball fights. Mademoiselle Sergent stared at us without seeing us, her mind elsewhere.
Tap, tap on the window-panes! Through the whirling feathers of the snow, we could see Dutertre knocking on the glass. He was all wrapped up in furs and wore a fur cap. He looked handsome in them, with his shining eyes and the teeth he is always displaying. The first bench (myself, Marie Belhomme, and the lanky Anaïs) came to life; I fluffed up my hair on my temples, Anaïs bit her lips to make them red and Marie tightened her belt by a hole. The Jaubert sisters clasped their hands like two pictures of First Communicants: ‘I am the temple of the Holy Ghost.’
Mademoiselle Sergent leapt to her feet, so brusquely that she upset her chair and her footstool, and ran to open the door. The sight of all this commotion made me split with laughter. Anaïs took advantage of my helplessness to pinch me and to make diabolical faces at me as she chewed charcoal and india-rubber. (However much they forbid her these strange comestibles, all day long her pockets and her mouth are filled with pencil stubs, filthy black india-rubber, charcoal, and pink blotting-paper. Chalk, pencil-lead and such-like satisfy her stomach in the most peculiar way: it must be those things she eats that give her a complexion the colour of wood and grey plaster. At least I only eat cigarette-paper and only one special kind of that. But that gawk Anaïs ruins the store from which they give out the school stationery. She asks for new ‘equipment’ every single week to such an extent that, at the beginning of term, the Municipal Council made a complaint.)
Dutertre shook his snow-powdered furs – they looked like his natural hide. Mademoiselle Sergent sparkled with such joy at the sight of him that it didn’t even occur to her to notice if I were watching her. He cracked jokes with her and his quick, resonant voice (he speaks with the accent they have up in the mountains) seemed to warm up the whole classroom. I inspected my nails and let my hair be well in evidence, for the visitor was directing most of his glances at us. After all, we’re big girls of fifteen and if my face looks younger than my age, my figure looks eighteen at least. And my hair is worth showing off, too. It makes a curly flying mass whose colour varies according to the season between dull chestnut and deep gold, and contrasts, by no means unattractively, with my coffee-brown eyes. Curly, as it is, it comes down almost to my hips. I’ve never worn plaits or a chignon. Chignons give me a headache and plaits don’t frame my face enough. When we play prisoners’ base, I gather up my heap of hair, which would make me too easy a victim, and tie it up in a horse’s tail. Well, after all, isn’t it prettier like that?
Mademoiselle Sergent finally broke off her raptured conversation with the District Superintendent and rapped out a: ‘Girls, you are behaving extremely badly!’ To confirm her in this conviction, Anaïs thought it helped to let out the ‘Hpp …’ of suppressed hysterical giggles without moving a muscle in her face. So it was at me that Mademoiselle shot a furious glance which boded punishment.
At last Monsieur Dutertre raised his voice and we heard him ask: ‘They’re working well, here? They’re keeping well?’
‘They’re keeping extremely well,’ replied Mademoiselle Sergent. ‘But they do little enough work. The laziness of those big girls is incredible!’
The moment we saw the handsome doctor turn towards us, we all bent over our work with an air of intense application as if we were too absorbed to remember he was there.
‘Ah! Ah!’ he said, coming towards our benches. ‘So we don’t do much work? What ideas have we in our heads? Is Mademoiselle Claudine no longer top in French composition?’
Those French compositions, how I loathe them! Such stupid and disgusting subjects: ‘Imagine the thoughts and actions of a young blind girl.’ (Why not deaf and dumb as well?) Or: ‘Write, so as to draw your own physical and moral portrait, to a brother whom you have not seen for ten years.’ (I have no fraternal bonds, I am an only child.) No one will ever know the efforts I have to make to restrain myself from writing pure spoof or highly subversive opinions! But, for all that, my companions – all except Anaïs – make such a hash of it that, in spite of myself I am ‘the outstanding pupil in literary composition.’
Dutertre had now arrived at the point he wanted to arrive at and I raised my head as Mademoiselle Sergent answered him.
‘Claudine? Oh, she’s still top. But it’s not her fault. She’s gifted for that and doesn’t need to make any effort.’
He sat down on the table, swinging one leg and addressing me as tu so as not to lose the habit of doing so.
‘So you’re lazy?’
‘Of course. It’s my only pleasure in the world.’
&nb
sp; ‘You don’t mean that seriously! You prefer reading, eh? What do you read? Everything you can lay hands on? Everything in your father’s library?’
‘No, Sir. Not books that bore me.’
‘I bet you’re teaching yourself some remarkable things. Give me your exercise-book.’
To read it more comfortably, he leant a hand on my shoulder and twisted a curl of my hair. This made the lanky Anaïs turn dangerously yellow; he had not asked for her exercise-book! I should pay for this favouritism by surreptitious pin-pricks, sly tale-telling to Mademoiselle Sergent, and being spied on whenever I talked to Mademoiselle Lanthenay. She was standing near the door of the small classroom, that charming Aimée, and she smiled at me so tenderly with her golden eyes that I was almost consoled for not having been able to talk to her today or yesterday except in front of my schoolmates. Dutertre laid down my exercise-book and stroked my shoulders in an absent-minded way. He was not thinking in the least about what he was doing, evidently … oh, very evidently …
‘How old are you?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Funny little girl! If you didn’t look so crazy, you’d seem older, you know. You’ll sit for your certificate next October?’
‘Yes, Sir, to please Papa.’
‘Your father? What on earth does it matter to him? But you yourself, you’re not particularly eager at the prospect?’
‘Oh yes, I am. It’ll amuse me to see all those people who question us. And besides there are concerns in the town then. It’ll be fun.’
‘You won’t go on to the training-college?’
I leapt in my seat.
‘Good heavens, no!’
‘Why so emphatic, you excitable girl?’
‘I don’t want to go there any more than I wanted to go to boarding-school – because you’re shut up.’
‘Oho! Your liberty means as much as all that to you, does it? Your husband won’t have things all his own way, poor fellow! Show me that face. Are you keeping well? A trifle anaemic, perhaps?’
This kindly doctor turned me towards the window, slipped his arm round me and gazed searchingly into my eyes with his wolfish stare. I made my own gaze frank and devoid of mystery. I always have dark circles under my eyes and he asked me if I suffered from palpitations and breathlessness.
‘No, never.’
I lowered my lids because if felt I was blushing idiotically. Also he was staring at me too hard! And I was conscious of Mademoiselle Sergent behind us, her nerves tense.
‘Do you sleep all night?’
I was furious at blushing more than ever as I answered:
‘Oh, yes, Sir. All night long.’
He did not press the point but stood upright and let go my waist.
‘Tcha! Fundamentally, you’re as sound as a bell.’
A little caress on my cheek, then he went on to the lanky Anaïs who was withering on her bench.
‘Show me your exercise-book.’
While he turned over the pages, pretty fast, Mademoiselle Sergent was fulminating in an undertone at the First Division (girls of twelve and fourteen who were already beginning to pinch in their waists and wear chignons), for the First Division had taken advantage of authority’s inattention to indulge in a Witches’ Sabbath. We could hear hands being smacked with rulers, the squeals of girls who were being pinched. They were letting themselves in for a general detention, not a doubt of it!
Anaïs was suffocated with joy at seeing her exercise-book in such august hands but no doubt Dutertre did not find her worth much attention for he passed on after paying her a few compliments and pinching her ear. He lingered some minutes by Marie Belhomme whose smooth, dark freshness attracted him but she was promptly overwhelmed with shyness. She lowered her head like a ram, said Yes when she meant No and addressed Dutertre as ‘Mademoiselle’. As to the two Jaubert sisters, he complimented them on their beautiful handwriting, as might have been foretold. At last, he left the room. Good riddance!
We still had ten minutes to go before the end of class; how could we use use them? I asked permission to leave the room so that I could surreptitiously gather up a handful of the still-falling snow. I made a snowball and bit into it; it was cold and delicious. It always smells a little of dust, this first fall. I hid it in my pocket and returned to the classroom. Everyone round me made signs to me and I passed the snowball round. Each of them, with the exception of the virtuous twins, bit into it with expressions of rapture. Then that ninny of a Marie Belhomme had to go and drop the last bit and Mademoiselle Sergent saw it.
‘Claudine! Have you gone and brought in snow again? This is really getting beyond the limit!’
She rolled her eyes so furiously that I bit back the retort ‘It’s the first time since last year’, for I was afraid Mademoiselle Lanthenay might suffer for my impertinence. So I opened my History of France without answering a word.
This evening I should be having my English lesson and that would console me for my silence.
At four o’clock, Mademoiselle Aimée appeared and we went off happily together.
How nice it was there with her in the warm library! I pulled my chair right up against hers and laid my head on her shoulder. She put her arm round me and I squeezed her supple waist.
‘Darling little Mademoiselle, it’s such ages since I’ve seen you!’
‘But … it’s only three days …’
‘What does that matter? … Don’t talk, and kiss me! You’re very unkind; time seems short to you when you’re away from me … Do they bore you frightfully, these lessons?’
‘Oh, Claudine! On the contrary, you know you’re the only person I can ever really talk to and I’m only happy when I’m here.’
She kissed me and I purred. Then, suddenly, I hugged her so violently that she gave a little shriek.
‘Claudine, we must work!’
I wished English grammar to the devil! I much preferred to lay my head on her breast while she stroked my hair or my neck and I could hear her heart beat breathlessly under my ear. How I loved being with her! Nevertheless, I had to take up a pen and at least pretend to be working! But really, what was the point? Who could possibly come in? Papa? Nothing less likely! Papa shuts himself up like a hermit in the most uncomfortable room on the first floor, the one where you freeze in winter and roast in summer and there he remains blindly absorbed, deaf to the noises of the world, busy with … But, of course … you haven’t read because it’ll never be finished, his great work on the Malacology of the Region of Fresnois and you’ll never know that, after complicated experiments and anxious vigils that have kept him bending for hours and hours over innumerable slugs enclosed in little bell-glasses and wire cages, Papa has established the following epoch-making fact: in one day, a limax flavus devours as much as 0.24 grammes of food whereas the helix ventricosa only consumes 0.19 grammes in the same time! How could you expect that the budding hope of such discoveries would leave a passionate malacologist any paternal sentiment between seven in the morning and nine at night? He’s the best and kindest of men – between two orgies of slugs. Moreover, he watches me live – when he has time to – with positive admiration. He’s astonished to see me existing ‘like a real human being’. This fact makes him laugh, with his small deep-set eyes and his noble Bourbon nose (wherever did he get that royal nose?) into his handsome beard that’s streaked with three colours – red, grey, and white. And how often I’ve seen that beard shining with traces of slime from the slugs!
I asked Aimée carelessly whether she’d seen the two friends, Rabastens and Richelieu, again. She became excited, which surprised me:
‘Ah! I forgot, I hadn’t told you … You know we sleep over at the infant-school now because they’re pulling down everything … Well, yesterday evening, I was working in my room round about ten o’clock and when I was closing the shutters before going to bed, I saw a tall shadow walking to and fro under my window, in all this cold! Guess who it was!’
‘One of those two, of course.’
> ‘Yes! But it was Armand. Would you ever have believed it of that shy chap?’
I said no, but actually I didn’t find it at all hard to believe. That tall, dark creature with the sombre, serious eyes seemed to me much less of a nonentity than the hearty Marseillais. Nevertheless I saw that Mademoiselle Aimée’s bird-like head was completely turned by this mild adventure. I asked her:
‘What? Do you already find him as interesting as all that, that solemn crow?’
‘No, of course not! I’m amused, that’s all.’
That was that, and the lesson ended without further confidences. It was only when we went out into the dark passage that I kissed her with all my might on her charming slim white neck and in the tendrils of her hair that smelt so nice. She’s as amusing to kiss as a warm, pretty little animal and she returned my kisses tenderly. Oh, I’d have kept her with me all the time if only I could!
Tomorrow would be Sunday. No school. What a bore! It’s the only place I find amusing.
That particular Sunday, I went to spend the afternoon where Claire lives – my sweet, gentle partner at my First Communion. She hasn’t been coming to school for a year now. We walked down the Chemin des Matignons which runs into the road leading to the station. It’s a lane that’s leafy and dark with greenery in summer; in these winter months there aren’t any leaves, of course, but you’re still sufficiently hidden there to be able to spy on the people sitting on the benches along the road. We walked on the crackling snow. The frozen puddles creaked musically under the sun with the charming sound, that’s like no other, of ice breaking up. Claire whispered about her mild flirtations with the boys at the dance on Sunday over at Trouillard’s; rough, clumsy boys. I quivered with excitement as I listened to her.
‘You know, Claudine, Montassuy was there too and he danced the polka with me, holding me tight against him. At that very minute, my brother, Eugène, who was dancing with Adèle Tricotot, let go of his partner, and jumped up in the air and banged his head against one of the hanging lamps. The lamp-glass turned upside down and that put out the lamp. While everyone was staring and saying “Ooh!” whatever d’you think happened? That fat Féfed turned off the other lamp and everything was as black as black … nothing but one candle right at the very far end of the little bar. My dear, all the time old mother Trouillard was fetching some matches, you heard nothing but screams and laughs and the sound of kisses. My brother was holding Adèle Tricotot just beside me and she kept on sighing like anything and saying “Let go of me, Eugène” in a muffled voice as if she’d got her skirts over her head. And that fat Féfed and his partner had fallen over on the floor. They were laughing and laughing, so much that they simply couldn’t get up again!’