Don’t you think a scarf would have served that purpose better?’
A scarf!
Why not a woollen muffler, you doddering old bore?
I couldn’t help laughing and this drew his attention to myself.
‘And you, my child, why is your hair not properly done and hanging all loose instead of being twisted up on your head and secured with hairpins?’
‘Sir, that gives me migraines.’
‘But you could at least plait it, I presume?’
‘Yes I could, but Papa doesn’t like me to.’
I can’t tell you how he irritated me!
After a disapproving little smack of his lips, he went and sat down and tormented Marie Belhomme about the War of Secession, one of the Jauberts about the coastline of Spain and the other about right-angled triangles.
Then he sent me to the blackboard and ordered me to draw a circle.
I obeyed.
It was a circle … if you chose to call it one.
‘Inside it, inscribe a rose-window with five lights.
Assume that it is lit from the left and indicate with heavy strokes the shadows the petals receive.’
That didn’t bother me at all.
If he’d wanted to make me calculate figures, I’d have been in a hopeless mess but I knew all about rose-windows and shadows.
I got through it quite well, much to the annoyance of the Jauberts who were sneakily hoping to see me scolded.
‘That’s … good.
Yes, that’s not bad at all.
You’re sitting for the Certificate Examination this year?’
‘Yes, Sir, in July.’
‘Then, no doubt, you wish to enter the Training College afterwards?’
‘No, Sir. I shall go back home.’
‘Indeed?
As a matter of fact, in my opinion, you have not the slightest vocation for teaching.
Very regrettable.’
He said that exactly as if he were saying: ‘In my opinion, you are an infanticide.’
Poor man, let him keep his illusions!
But I could only wish he had been able to see the Armand Duplessis drama or the way we were left on our own for hours while our two mistresses were upstairs, billing and cooing …
‘Be so good as to show me your Second Class, Mademoiselle.’
Mademoiselle Sergent took him off to the Second classroom where she remained with him to protect her little darling against inspectorial severity.
I profited by his absence to sketch a caricature of old Blanchot and his huge whiskers on the blackboard. This sent the girls into ecstasies. I added donkey’s ears, then I quickly rubbed it out and went back to my place. Little Luce slipped her arm coaxingly under mine and tried to kiss me.
I pushed her away with a light slap and she pretended that I was ‘simply horrid’!
‘Simply horrid?
I’ll teach you to take liberties like that with me!
Try and muzzle your feelings and tell me if it’s still always Mademoiselle Griset who sleeps in the dormitory.’
‘No, Aimee’s slept there twice two days running.’
‘That makes four times.
You’re a duffer; not even a duffer, a total nitwit!
Do the boarders keep quieter when it’s your chaste sister who’s sleeping under the canopy?’
‘Not a bit.
And one night even, when one of the girls was ill, we got up and opened a window … I even called out to my sister to give us some matches because we couldn’t find any, and she didn’t budge. She didn’t breathe any more than if there were no one in the bed at all!
Does that mean that she’s a very heavy sleeper?’
‘Heavy sleeper!
Heavy sleeper! What a goose you are!
Good Lord, why have you allowed beings so utterly deprived of intelligence to exist on this earth?
They make me weep tears of blood!’
‘What have I done now?’
‘Nothing!