If you’re good, I’ll give you my lovely ebony ruler, the one with the brass edges.’
‘Oh, you are sweet! I’d like to kiss you but that annoys you …’
‘That’ll do.
I’ll give it you tomorrow – if I feel like it!’
For my passion for ‘desk-furniture’ was becoming appeased, which was yet another very bad symptom.
All my classmates (and I used to be just like them) were crazy about ‘school equipment’. We ruined ourselves on exercise-books of cream-laid paper bound in shimmering tinfoil with a moire pattern, on rosewood pencils, on lacquered penholders shiny enough to see one’s face in, on olive-wood pencil-boxes, on rulers made of mahogany or of ebony, like mine, which had its four edges bound with brass and which made the boarders, who were too poor to afford one like it, green with envy.
We had big satchels like lawyers’ briefcases in more-or-less crushed more-or-less Morocco.
And if the girls didn’t have their school text-books sheathed in gaudy bindings for their New Year presents, and if I didn’t either, it was simply and solely because they were not our own property.
They belonged to the Town Council which generously provided us with them on condition we left them at the School when we left it never to return.
Moreover, we loathed those bureaucratic books; we didn’t feel they belonged to us and we played horrible tricks on them.
Unforeseen and fantastic mishaps befell them: some of them had been known to catch fire at the stove, in winter; there were others over which inkpots took a particular delight in upsetting; in fact, they attracted disaster!
And all the affronts put upon the dreary ‘Council Books’ were the subject of long lamentations from Mademoiselle Lanthenay and terrible lectures from Mademoiselle Sergent. *
Lord, how idiotic women are! (Little girls, women, it’s all one.) Would anyone believe that, ever since that inveterate wolf Dutertre’s ‘guilty attempts’ on my person, I’ve felt what might be called a vague pride?
It’s very humiliating to me, that admission.
But I know why; in my heart of hearts, I tell myself:
‘If that man, who’s known heaps of women, in Paris and all over the place, finds me attractive, it must be because I’m not remarkably ugly!’
There! It was a pleasure to my vanity.
I didn’t really think I was repulsive, but I like to be sure I’m not.
And besides, I was pleased at having a secret that the lanky Anais, Marie Belhomme, Luce Lanthenay and the others didn’t suspect.
The class was well trained now. All the girls, even down to those in the Third Division knew that, during recreation, they must never enter a classroom in which the mistresses had shut themselves up.
Naturally, our education hadn’t been perfected in a day!
One or other of us had gone at least fifty times into the classroom where the tender couple was hiding.
But we found them so tenderly entwined, or so absorbed in their whisperings, or else Mademoiselle Sergent holding her little Aimee on her lap with such total lack of reserve that even the stupidest were nonplussed and fled as soon as the Redhead demanded:
‘What do you want now?’, terrified by the ferocious scowl of her bushy eyebrows.
Like the others, I frequently burst in and sometimes even without meaning to: the first few times, when they saw it was me and they were too close together, they hastily got up or else one of them would pretend to pin up the other’s loosened hair. But they ended up by not disturbing themselves on my account.
So I no longer found it entertaining.
Rabastens doesn’t come over any more: he has declared over and over again that he is ‘too intimidated by this intimacy’ and this expression seemed to him a kind of pun which delighted him.
As for them, they no longer think of anything but themselves.
They dog each other’s footsteps and live in each other’s shadow: their mutual adoration is so absolute that I no longer think of tormenting them. I almost envy their delicious oblivion of everything else in the world. *
There!
I was sure it would happen sooner or later!
A letter from little Luce that I found when I got home, in a pocket of my satchel.
My Darling Claudine,
I love you very much. You always look as if you didn’t know anything about it and that makes me die of misery.
You are both nice and nasty to me, you don’t want to take me seriously, you treat me as if I were a little dog: you can’t imagine how that hurts me.
But just think how happy we could be, the two of us; look at my sister Aimee with Mademoiselle, they’re so happy that they don’t think of anything else now.
I implore you, if you’re not annoyed by this letter, not to say anything to me tomorrow morning at school, I’d be too embarrassed at that moment.
I’ll know very well, just from the sort of way you talk to me during the day, whether you want to be my friend or not.
I kiss you with all my heart, my darling Claudine and I count on you, too, to burn this letter because I know you wouldn’t want to show it so as to get me into trouble, that’s not your way.
I kiss you again very lovingly and I’m longing so impatiently for it to be tomorrow!
Your little Luce
Good heavens no, I don’t want to!
If that appealed to me, it would be with someone stronger and more intelligent than myself, someone who’d bully me a little, whom I’d obey, and not with a depraved little beast who has a certain charm, perhaps, scratching and mewing just to be stroked, but who’s too inferior.
I don’t love people I can dominate.
I tore up her letter straight away, charming and unmalicious as it was, and put the pieces in an envelope to return them to her.
The next morning I saw a worried little face pressed against the window, waiting for me.
Poor Luce, her green eyes were pale with anxiety!
What a pity, but all the same I couldn’t, just for the sake of giving her pleasure …
I went inside; as luck would have it, she was all alone.
‘Look, little Luce, here are the bits of your letter. I didn’t keep it long, you see.’