Chapter Six
She had read "Paul and Virginia," and she had dreamed of the
little bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fiddle, but
above all of the sweet friendship of some dear little brother,
who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or who
runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird's nest.
When she was thirteen, her father himself took her to town to
place her in the convent. They stopped at an inn in the St.
Gervais quarter, where, at their supper, they used painted plates
that set forth the story of Mademoiselle de la Valliere. The
explanatory legends, chipped here and there by the scratching of
knives, all glorified religion, the tendernesses of the heart,
and the pomps of court.
Far from being bored at first at the convent, she took pleasure
in the society of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, took her
to the chapel, which one entered from the refectory by a long
corridor. She played very little during recreation hours, knew
her catechism well, and it was she who always answered Monsieur
le Vicaire's difficult questions. Living thus, without every
leaving the warm atmosphere of the classrooms, and amid these
pale-faced women wearing rosaries with brass crosses, she was
softly lulled by the mystic languor exhaled in the perfumes of
the altar, the freshness of the holy water, and the lights of the
tapers. Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious
vignettes with their azure borders in her book, and she loved the
sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the
poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries. She tried, by
way of mortification, to eat nothing a whole day. She puzzled her
head to find some vow to fulfil.
When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order
that she might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her
hands joined, her face against the grating beneath the whispering
of the priest. The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial
lover, and eternal marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred
within her soul depths of unexpected sweetness.
In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading
in the study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred
history or the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays
passages from the "Genie du Christianisme," as a recreation. How
she listened at first to the sonorous lamentations of its
romantic melancholies reechoing through the world and eternity!
If her childhood had been spent in the shop-parlour of some
business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her heart to
those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to us only
through translation in books. But she knew the country too well;
she knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the ploughs.
Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary,
to those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of
its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.
She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she
rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate
desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental
than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.
At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each
month to mend the linen. Patronized by the clergy, because she
belonged to an ancient family of noblemen ruined by the
Revolution, she dined in the refectory at the table of the good
sisters, and after the meal had a bit of chat with them before
going back to her work. The girls often slipped out from the
study to go and see her. She knew by heart the love songs of the
last century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched away.
She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and
on the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carried
in the pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself
swallowed long chapters in the intervals of her work. They were
all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in
lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden
to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs,
tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in
shady groves, "gentlemen" brave as lions, gentle as lambs,
virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping
like fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of
age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical
events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She
would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those
long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches,
spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a
cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the
distant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and
enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan of
Arc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and Clemence
Isaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of
heaven, where also were seen, lost in shadow, and all
unconnected, St. Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard, some
cruelties of Louis XI, a little of St. Bartholomew's Day, the
plume of the Bearnais, and always the remembrance of the plates
painted in honour of Louis XIV.
In the music class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothing
but little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagunes,
gondoliers;-mild compositions that allowed her to catch a glimpse
athwart the obscurity of style and the weakness of the music of
the attractive phantasmagoria of sentimental realities. Some of
her companions brought "keepsakes" given them as new year's gifts
to the convent. These had to be hidden; it was quite an
undertaking; they were read in the dormitory. Delicately handling
the beautiful satin bindings, Emma looked with dazzled eyes at
the names of the unknown authors, who had signed their verses for
the most part as counts or viscounts.
She trembled as she blew back the tissue paper over the engraving
and saw it folded in two and fall gently against the page. Here
behind the balustrade of a balcony was a young man in a short
cloak, holding in his arms a young girl in a white dress wearing
an alms-bag at her belt; or there were nameless portraits of
English ladies with fair curls, who looked at you from under
their round straw hats with their large clear eyes. Some there
were lounging in their carriages, gliding through parks, a
greyhound bounding along in front of the equipage driven at a
trot by two midget postilions in white breeches. Others, dreaming
on sofas with an open letter, gazed at the moon through a
slightly open window half draped by a black curtain. The naive
ones, a tear on their cheeks, were kissing doves through the bars
of a Gothic cage, or, smiling, their heads on one side, were
plucking the leaves of a marguerite with their taper fingers,
that curved at the tips like peaked shoes. And you, too, were
there, Sultans with long pipes reclining beneath arbours in the
arms of Bayaderes; Djiaours, Turkish sabres, Greek caps; and you
especially, pale landscapes of dithyrambic lands, that often show
us at once palm trees and firs, tigers on the right, a lion to
the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon; the whole framed by a
very neat virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular sunbeam
trembling in the water, where, standing out in relief like white
excoriations on a steel-grey ground, swans are swimming about.
And the shade of the argand lamp fastened to the wall above
Emma's head lighted up all these pictures of the world, that
passed before her one by one in the silence of the dormitory, and
to the distant noise of some belated carriage rolling over the
Boulevards.
When her mother died she cried much the first few days. She had a
funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a
letter sent to the Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, she
asked to be buried later on in the same grave. The goodman
thought she must be ill, and came to see her. Emma was secretly
pleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of
pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. She let herself
glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on
lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of the
leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of
the Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She wearied of it,
would not confess it, continued from habit, and at last was
surprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness at
heart than wrinkles on her brow.
The good nuns, who had been so sure of her vocation, perceived
with great astonishment that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be
slipping from them. They had indeed been so lavish to her of
prayers, retreats, novenas, and sermons, they had so often
preached the respect due to saints and martyrs, and given so much
good advice as to the modesty of the body and the salvation of
her soul, that she did as tightly reined horses; she pulled up
short and the bit slipped from her teeth. This nature, positive
in the midst of its enthusiasms, that had loved the church for
the sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the songs,
and literature for its passional stimulus, rebelled against the
mysteries of faith as it grew irritated by discipline, a thing
antipathetic to her constitution. When her father took her from
school, no one was sorry to see her go. The Lady Superior even
thought that she had latterly been somewhat irreverent to the
community.
Emma, at home once more, first took pleasure in looking after the
servants, then grew disgusted with the country and missed her
convent. When Charles came to the Bertaux for the first time, she
thought herself quite disillusioned, with nothing more to learn,
and nothing more to feel.
But the uneasiness of her new position, or perhaps the
disturbance caused by the presence of this man, had sufficed to
make her believe that she at last felt that wondrous passion
which, till then, like a great bird with rose-coloured wings,
hung in the splendour of the skies of poesy; and now she could
not think that the calm in which she lived was the happiness she
had dreamed.
