Then I let out an ‘Oh!’ of desolation, spreading out all my fingers like spiders.
Madame Sergent took the time to remark that this was typical of me and sent me off to wash my hands under the pump.
Once outside, I wiped my fingers with the blackboard sponge to take off the worst of it, then I searched about, peering into every corner.
Nothing in the house.
I went outside again and walked as far as the little wall that separated us from the Headmaster’s garden.
Still nothing.
But no! There were people talking on the other side.
Who?
I leant over the wall to look down into the garden which is a yard or two lower than our playground and there, under the leafless hazels, in the pallid sunshine, so faint you could hardly feel it, I saw the sombre Richelieu talking to Mademoiselle Aimee Lanthenay.
Two or three days ago I’d have stood on my head and waved my feet in astonishment at this spectacle, but my recent betrayal had slightly inured me to shocks.
That shy, unsociable Duplessis!
At the moment, he had found his tongue and no longer kept his eyes lowered.
He had burnt his boats then?
‘Tell me, Mademoiselle, didn’t you suspect?
Oh, do say you did!’
Aimee, her face quite pink, was quivering with joy. Her eyes were more golden than ever and they kept alertly watching and listening all about her as she spoke.
She gave a charming laugh to indicate that she hadn’t suspected anything at all, the liar!
‘Come, you must have suspected when I used to spend my evenings under your windows.
But I love you with all my might … not just to flirt for a term and then go off on my holidays and forget you.
Will you listen to me seriously, as I am speaking to you now?’
‘Is it as serious as all that?’
‘Yes, I assure you it is.
Will you authorize me to come and talk to you tonight in the presence of Mademoiselle?’
Oh bother!
I heard the door of the classroom opening: they were coming to see what had become of me.
In two bounds I was far from the wall and almost beside the pump. I flung myself on my knees on the ground and when the Headmistress, accompanied by Rabastens, came up to me, she found me energetically rubbing the ink on my hands with sand, ‘because water won’t take it off’.
This was a great success.
‘Leave off doing that,’ said Mademoiselle Sergent, ‘you can take it off at home with pumice-stone.’
The handsome Antonin addressed a ‘Good-bye’ to me that was both gay and melancholy.
I had stood up and I gave him my most undulating toss of the head which makes my curls ripple softly all down my cheeks.
Behind his back, I laughed: the great hobbledehoy, he thought he had completed my conquest!
I returned to the classroom to fetch my hood and I walked home brooding over the conversation I had overhead behind the little wall.
What a pity I hadn’t been able to hear the end of their amorous dialogue!
Aimee would have consented, without being pressed, to accept the attentions of this inflammable but honest Richelieu and he was capable of asking her to marry him.
What is it that makes people so infatuated with this little woman who, strictly speaking, isn’t even pretty?
She’s fresh, it’s true, and she has magnificent eyes; but, after all, there are plenty of beautiful eyes in really pretty faces, yet all the men stare at her!
The builders stop mixing mortar when she passes by, winking at each other and clicking their tongues. (Yesterday, I heard one of them say to his mate as he pointed her out:
‘Strewth, I wouldn’t half like to be a flea in her bed!’) The boys in the streets put on swank for her and the old gentlemen who frequent the Cafe de la Perle and take their Vermouths there every evening discuss with interest ‘that little girl who teaches at the school, who makes your mouth water like a fruit tart that isn’t sugared enough’.
Builders, retired businessmen, headmistress, schoolmaster, why do they all fall for her?
As for myself, I’m not quite so interested in her since I’ve discovered what a traitress she is. And I feel quite empty; empty of my tenderness; empty of my fierce misery of that first evening. *
They’ve been pulling it down fast and now they’ve nearly pulled it down altogether, poor old school!
When they were demolishing the ground floor, we watched, with great curiosity, the discovery of some double walls. We had always thought those walls thick and solid; now they turned out to be as hollow as cupboards with a kind of black passage between them where there was nothing but dust and an appalling, ancient, repulsive stench.
I took much pleasure in frightening Marie Belhomme by telling her that these hiding-places had been built in the old days for the walling-up of women who were unfaithful to their husbands and that I’d seen white bones lying among the rubble.
She looked at me with wide, scared eyes and asked:
‘Is it really true?’ Then she hurried to the walls to ‘see the bones’.
The next minute, she was back at my side.
‘I didn’t see a thing. It’s just another of your fibs you’re telling me!’
‘May I lose the use of my tongue this instant if those hiding-places in the walls weren’t hollowed out for a criminal end!
And, besides, you’re a nice one to tell me I’m fibbing, considering you’ve got a chrysanthemum hidden in your Marmontel – the one Monsieur Antonin Rabastens was wearing in his buttonhole!’
I shouted this at the top of my voice because I had just caught sight of Mademoiselle Sergent coming into the playground, with Dutertre in her wake.