And Marie Belhomme, a goose but such a cheerful one!
At fifteen, she has as much reasoning power and common sense as a rather backward child of eight; she overflows with colossally naive remarks that disarm our maliciousness and we are very fond of her.
I’m always saying any amount of disgraceful things in front of her because, at first, she’s genuinely shocked and then, the next minute, she laughs wholeheartedly, flinging up her long, narrow hands as high as they’ll go. ‘Her midwife’s hands’ Anais calls them.
Dark, with a matt complexion, long, humid black eyes, and an innocent nose, Marie looks like a pretty, timid hare.
These four and myself make up an envied set this year; from now on we rank above the ‘big girls’ as aspirants to the elementary School Certificate.
The rest, in our eyes, are mere scum; lower orders beneath contempt!
I shall introduce a few more of my schoolmates in the course of this diary for it is definitely a diary, or very nearly one, that I am about to begin …
When Madame X received the notice of her dismissal, she cried about it for an entire day, poor woman – and so did we. This inspired me with a strong aversion for her successor.
Just when the demolishers of the old school made their appearance in the playground, the new Headmistress, Mademoiselle Sergent, arrived. She was accompanied by her mother, a fat woman in a starched cap who waits on her daughter and admires her and who gives me the impression of a wily peasant who knows the price of butter but is not bad at heart.
As for Mademoiselle Sergent, she seemed anything but kindly and I augured ill of that redhead. She has a good figure, with well-rounded bust and hips, but she is flagrantly ugly.
Her face is puffy and permanently crimson and her nose is slightly snub between two small black eyes, deep-set and suspicious.
She occupies a room in the old school which does not have to be demolished straight away and so does her assistant, the pretty Aimee Lanthenay who attracts me as much as her superior repels me.
Against Mademoiselle Sergent, the intruder, I keep up a fierce and rebellious attitude.
She has already tried to tame me but I’ve jibbed in an almost insolent way.
After a few lively skirmishes, I have to admit that she is an unusually good Headmistress; decisive, often imperious, with a strength of purpose that would be admirably clear-sighted if it were not occasionally blinded by rage.
If she had more command over herself, that woman would be admirable.
But, if one resists her, her eyes blaze and her red hair becomes soaked with sweat. The day before yesterday I saw her leave the room so as not to throw an inkpot at my head.
At recreation-time, since the damp cold of this wretched autumn doesn’t make me feel in the least inclined to play games, I talk to Mademoiselle Aimee.
Our intimacy is progressing very fast.
Her nature is like a demonstrative cat’s; she is delicate, acutely sensitive to cold, and incredibly caressing in her ways.
I like looking at her nice pink face, like a fair-haired little girl’s, and at her golden eyes with their curled-up lashes.
Lovely eyes that only ask to smile! They make the boys turn and look after her when she goes out.
Often, when we’re talking in the doorway of the little crowded classroom, Mademoiselle Sergent passes by us on the way back to her room. She doesn’t say a word but fixes us with her jealous, searching looks.
Her silence makes us feel, my new friend and I, that she’s furious at seeing us ‘hit it off’ so well.
This little Aimee – she’s nineteen and only comes up to my ears – chatters, like the schoolgirl she still was only three months ago, with a need for affection and with repressed gestures that touch me.
Repressed gestures!
She controls them from an instinctive fear of Mademoiselle Sergent, clutching her cold little hands tight under the imitation fur collar (poor little thing, she has no money like thousands of her kind).
To make her less shy, I behave gently (it isn’t difficult) and I ask her questions, quite content just to look at her.
When she talks she’s pretty, in spite of – or because of – her irregular little face.
If her cheekbones are a trifle too salient, if her rather too full mouth, under the short nose, makes a funny little dint at the left side when she laughs, what marvellous golden-yellow eyes she has to make up for them! And what a complexion – one of those complexions that look so delicate but are so reliable that the cold doesn’t even turn them blue!
She talks and she talks – about her father who’s a gem-cutter and her mother who was liberal with her smacks, about her sister and her three brothers, about the hard training-college in the country-town where the water froze in the jugs and where she was always dropping with sleep because they got up at five o’clock (luckily the English mistress was very nice to her), about the holidays at home where they used to force her to go back to housework, telling her she’d do better to cook than to sham the young lady. All this was unfolded in her endless chatter; all that poverty-stricken youth that she had endured with impatience and remembered with terror.
Little Mademoiselle Lanthenay, your supple body seeks and demands an unknown satisfaction.
If you were not an assistant mistress at Montigny you might be … I’d rather not say what.
But how I like listening to you and looking at you – you who are four years older than I am and yet make me feel every single moment like your elder sister!
My new confidante told me one day that she knew quite a lot of English and this inspired me with a simply marvellous idea.
I asked Papa (as he takes Mama’s place) if he wouldn’t like me to get Mademoiselle Aimee Lanthenay to give me lessons in English grammar.
Papa thought the idea a good one, like most of my ideas, and to ‘clinch the matter’, as he says, he came with me to see Mademoiselle Sergent.
She received us with a stony politeness and, while Papa was explaining his idea to her, she seemed to be approving it. But I felt vaguely uneasy at not seeing her eyes while she was talking. (I’d noticed very quickly that her eyes always tell what she is thinking without her being able to disguise it and I was worried to observe that she kept them obstinately lowered.) Mademoiselle Aimee was called down and arrived eager and blushing. She kept repeating
‘Yes, Monsieur’, and
‘Certainly, Monsieur’, hardly realizing what she was saying, while I watched her, highly delighted with my ruse and rejoicing in the thought that, henceforth, I should have her with me in more privacy than on the threshold of the small classroom.
Price of the lessons: fifteen francs a month and two sessions a week. For this poor little assistant mistress, who earns sixty-five francs a month and has to pay for her keep out of it, this was a windfall beyond her dreams.
I believe, too, that she was pleased at the idea of being with me more often.
During that visit, I barely exchanged a couple of sentences with her.
The day of our first lesson!
I waited for her after class while she collected her English books and off we went to my home!
I’d arranged a comfortable corner for us in Papa’s library – a big table, pens, and exercise-books, with a good lamp that only lit the table.
Mademoiselle Aimee, extremely embarrassed (why?), blushed and said with a nervous little cough:
‘Now then, Claudine, you know your alphabet, I think?’
‘Of course, Mademoiselle. I also know a little grammar. I could easily do that little bit of translation … We’re cosy here, aren’t we?’
‘Yes, very cosy.’