Claudine at School
MY NAME IS CLAUDINE, I live in Montigny; I was born there in 1884; I shall probably not die there.
My Manual of Departmental Geography expresses itself thus:
‘Montigny-en-Fresnois, a pretty little town of 1,950 inhabitants, built in tiers above the Thaize; its well-preserved Saracen tower is worthy of note …’ To me, those descriptions are totally meaningless!
To begin with, the Thaize doesn’t exist.
Of course I know it’s supposed to run through the meadows under the level-crossing but you won’t find enough water there in any season to give a sparrow a foot-bath.
Montigny ‘built in tiers’?
No, that’s not how I see it; to my mind, the houses just tumble haphazard from the top of the hill to the bottom of the valley.
They rise one above the other, like a staircase, leading up to a bit chateau that was rebuilt under Louis XV and is already more dilapidated than the squat, ivy-sheathed Saracen tower that crumbles away from the top a trifle more every day.
Montigny is a village, not a town: its streets, thank heaven, are not paved; the showers roll down them in little torrents that dry up in a couple of hours; it is a village, not even a very pretty village, but, all the same, I adore it.
The charm, the delight of this countryside composed of hills and of valleys so narrow that some are ravines, lies in the woods – the deep, encroaching woods that ripple and wave away into the distance as far as you can see … Green meadows make rifts in them here and there, so do little patches of cultivation. But these do not amount to much, for the magnificent woods devour everything.
As a result, this lovely region is atrociously poor and its few scattered farms provide just the requisite number of red roofs to set off the velvety green of the woods.
Dear woods! I know them all; I’ve scoured them so often.
There are the copses, where bushes spitefully catch your face as you pass.
Those are full of sun and strawberries and lilies-of-the-valley; they are also full of snakes.
I’ve shuddered there with choking terror at the sight of those dreadful, smooth, cold little bodies gliding just in front of my feet.
Dozens of times near the ‘rose-mallow’ I’ve stopped still, panting, when I’ve found a well-behaved grass snake under my hand. It would be neatly coiled up, like a snail-shell, with its head raised and its little golden eyes staring at me: it was not dangerous, but how it frightened me!
But never mind all that: I shall always end by going back there, alone or with my friends. Better alone, because those girls are so young-lady-ish that they annoy me. They’re frightened of being scratched by brambles; they’re frightened of little creatures such as hairy caterpillars and those pretty heath-spiders that are as pink and round as pearls; they squeal, they get tired – in fact, they’re insufferable.
And then there are my favourites, the great woods that are sixteen and twenty years old. It makes my heart bleed to see one of those cut down.
No bushy undergrowth in them but trees like pillars and narrow paths where it is almost night at noon, where one’s voice and one’s steps resound in a disturbing way.
Heavens, how I love them!
I feel so much alone there, my eyes lost far away among the trees, in the green, mysterious daylight that is at once deliciously peaceful and a little unnerving because of the loneliness and the vague darkness … No small creatures in those great dark woods; no tall grasses; but beaten earth, now dry, and sonorous, now soft on account of the springs. Rabbits with white scuts range through them, and timid deer who run so fast that you can only guess their passage. Great heavy pheasants too, red and golden, and wild boars (I’ve never seen one) and wolves. I heard a wolf once, at the beginning of winter, while I was picking up beech-nuts – those nice, oily little beech-nuts that tickle your throat and make you cough.
Sometimes storm-showers surprise you in those woods; you huddle under an oak that is thicker than the others and listen to the rain pattering up there as if on a roof. You’re so well-sheltered that when you come out of those depths you are quite lost and dazzled and feel ill at ease in the broad daylight.
And the fir-woods!
Not very deep, these, and hardly at all mysterious. I love them for their smell, for the pink and purple heather that grows under them and for the way they sing in the wind.
Before you get to them, you have to go through dense forest; then suddenly you have the delicious surprise of coming out on the edge of a lake; a smooth, deep lake, enclosed on all sides by the woods, far, far away from everything!
The firs grow on a kind of island in the middle; you have to straddle bravely across on a fallen tree-trunk that bridges the two banks.
Under the firs, you light a fire, even in summer, because it’s forbidden; you cook any old thing, an apple, a pear, a potato stolen from a field, some wholemeal bread if you’ve nothing better.
And there’s a smell of acrid smoke and resin – it’s abominable but it’s exquisite.
I have lived ten years of wild rovings, of conquests and discoveries, in those woods; the day when I have to leave them my heart will be very heavy.
Two months ago, when I turned fifteen and let down my skirts to my ankles, they demolished the old school and changed the Headmistress.
The long skirts were necessitated by my calves; they attracted glances and were already making me look too much like a young lady. The old school was falling into ruins. As for the Headmistress, poor good Madame X, forty, ugly, ignorant, gentle, and always terrified in the presence of the Elementary School inspectors, Doctor Dutertre, our District Superintendent of Schools, needed her place for a protegee of his own.
In this part of the world, what Dutertre wishes, the Minister wishes too.
Poor old school, dilapidated and unhygienic, but so amusing!
The handsome buildings they are putting up now will never make me forget you!
The rooms on the first floor, the ones belonging to the masters, were cheerless and uncomfortable. The ground floor was occupied by our two classrooms, the big girls’ and the little girls’; two rooms of incredible ugliness and dirtiness, with tables whose like I have never seen since.
They were worn down to half their height by constant use and, by rights, we ought to have become hunchbacks after six months of sitting over them.
The smell of those classrooms, after the three hours of study in the morning and in the afternoon, was literally enough to knock you down.
I have never had schoolmates of my own kind, for the few middle-class families of Montigny send their children as a matter of course to boarding-school in the main county town. Thus the school’s only pupils were the daughters of grocers, farmers, policemen, and, for the most part, of labourers; all of them none too well washed.
The reason I find myself in this strange milieu is that I do not want to leave Montigny. If had a Mamma, I know very well that she would not have let me stay here twenty-four hours. But Papa – he doesn’t notice anything and doesn’t bother about me. He is entirely wrapped up in his work and it never occurs to him that I might be more suitably brought up in a convent or in some Lycee or other.
There’s no danger of my opening his eyes!
As companions therefore, I had – and still have – Claire (I won’t give her surname) who made her First Communion with me, a gentle girl with beautiful, soft eyes and a romantic little soul.
She spent her time at school becoming enamoured (oh! platonically, of course!) of a new boy every week and, even now, her only ambition is to fall in love with the first idiot of an assistant-master or road-surveyor who happens to be in the mood for ‘poetical’ declarations.
Then there’s the lanky Anais who, no doubt, will succeed in entering the portals of the school at Fontenay-aux-Roses, thanks to a prodigious memory which takes the place of real intelligence. She is cold, vicious, and so impossible to upset that she never blushes, lucky creature!
She is a positive past mistress of comedy and often makes me quite ill with laughing.
Her hair is neither dark nor fair; she has a yellow skin, no colour in her cheeks, and narrow black eyes, and she is as tall as a bean-pole.
Someone quite out of the ordinary, in fact. Liar, toady, swindler, and traitress, that lanky Anais will always know how to get out of any scrape in life.
At thirteen, she was writing to some booby of her own age and making assignations with him; this got about and resulted in gossip which upset all the girls in the school except herself.
Then there are the Jauberts, two sisters – twins actually – both model pupils. Model pupils! Don’t I know it! I could cheerfully flay them alive, they exasperate me so much with their good behaviour and their pretty, neat handwriting and their silly identical flat, flabby faces and sheep’s eyes full of maudlin mildness.
They swot all the time; they’re bursting with good marks; they’re prim and underhand and their breath smells of glue. Ugh!