At last, the door glittered before our eyes.
When I say glittered, I am using the word in a literary way … for, after all, there actually wasn’t a lamp-post!
In front of that closed door, a crowd of agitated shadows was screaming, jumping for joy or lamenting; they were our competitors from the other schools.
Sudden, brief match-flares, soon extinguished, and flickering candle-flames lit up a great white sheet pinned to the door.
Nothing would stop us: we dashed forward, brutally shoving away the small, milling silhouettes; no one paid the least attention to us.
Holding the stolen candle as straight as I could, I read and divined, guided by the initials in alphabetical order:
‘Anais, Belhomme, Claudine, Jaubert, Lanthenay.’
All of us! All!
What joy!
And now came the verifying of the number of marks.
The minimum of marks required was 45; the total was written beside the names, the detailed marks between two brackets.
Mademoiselle Sergent, in ecstasy, transcribed in her notebook: ‘Anais 65, Claudine 68 – what did the Jauberts get?
63 and 64, Luce 49, Marie Belhomme 44?.
What? 44??
But you’ve not qualified then?
Whatever’s this you’re telling me?’
‘No, Mademoiselle,’ said Luce, who had just gone up to verify. ‘It’s 44? … she’s qualified with a quarter of a mark short … by a special favour of those gentlemen.’
Poor Marie, quite out of breath from the terrible fright she had just had, gave a long sigh of relief.
It was decent of those chaps to have overlooked her quarter of a mark but I was afraid she would make a mess of the Oral.
Anais, once her first joy was over, charitably held up a light for the new arrivals, while spattering them with melted wax, horrid girl!
Mademoiselle could not calm us, not even by dousing us with the cold water of this sinister prediction:
‘You’re not at the end of your troubles yet. I should like to see your faces tomorrow night after the Oral.’
With difficulty she got us back to the hotel, skipping about and singing in the moonlight.
And later on, when the Headmistress was in bed and asleep, we got out of our beds and danced, Anais, Luce, Marie and I (not the Jauberts, of course). We danced wildly, our hair flying, holding out our brief chemises as if for a minuet.
Then, at a fancied noise from the direction of the room where Mademoiselle reposed, the dancers of this unseemly quadrille fled with suppressed giggles and a rustling of bare feet. *
The next morning, waking up too early, I ran in to scare the life out of the Anais–Luce couple which was sleeping in an absorbed, conscientious way.
I tickled Luce’s nose with my hair; she sneezed before she opened her eyes and her dismay woke Anais who grumbled and sat up, cursing me.
I exclaimed, with immense seriousness:
‘But don’t you know what time it is?
Seven o’clock, my dear, and the Oral’s at half past.’
I let them hurl themselves out of bed and put on their stockings and I waited till they’d buttoned up their boots before telling them it was only six, that I’d seen it wrong.
This didn’t annoy them as much as I’d hoped.
At a quarter to seven, Mademoiselle hustled us, hurried us over our chocolate, insisted on our casting a glance through our history summaries while we ate our slices of bread and butter and finally pushed us out into the sunlit street, completely dazed.
Luce was armed with her pencilled cuffs, Marie with her tube of rolled-up paper, Anais with her miniature atlas.
They clung to these little life-saving planks even more than yesterday for today they had to talk; talk to their Lordships whom they did not know; talk in front of thirty pairs of malicious little ears.
Anais was the only one who looked cheerful; she did not know the meaning of intimidation.
In the dilapidated courtyard, there were far fewer candidates today; so many had fallen by the wayside between the written exam and the oral! (That was good; when they admit a lot to the written, they turn down a lot for the oral.) Nearly all of them looked pale, yawned nervously and complained, like Marie Belhomme, of a tight feeling in their stomachs … that disturbing stage-fright!
The door opened to admit the black-garbed men: we followed them silently to the room upstairs, stripped today of all its chairs. In each of the four corners, behind black tables (or rather, tables that had once been black) an examiner seated himself, solemn, almost lugubrious.
While we were taking in this stage-setting, feeling both curious and fearful, as we stood massed in the doorway, embarrassed by the vast space we had to cross, Mademoiselle gave us a push:
‘Go on! Go on, for goodness’ sake! Are you going to take root here?’
Our group advanced more boldly, in a bunch: old Salle, gnarled and shrivelled, stared at us without seeing us, he was so incredibly short-sighted; Roubaud was playing with his watch-chain, his eyes abstracted; the elderly Lerouge was waiting patiently and consulting the list of names; and, in the embrasure of a window, a fat lady, Mademoiselle Michelet, was enthroned, with sol-fa charts in front of her.
I nearly forgot another one, the bad-tempered Lacroix, who was grumbling and furiously shrugging his shoulders as he turned over the pages of his books and seemed to be having a fierce argument with himself; the girls, terrified, were telling each other he must be ‘an absolute beast’!
He was the one who made up his mind to growl out a name:
‘Mademoiselle Aubert!’
The said Aubet, an overgrown girl, limp and stooping, started like a horse, squinted and promptly became stupid. In her desire to do the right thing, she bounded forward, shouting in trumpet-like tones, and with a strong peasant accent:
‘But here I be, Surr!’
We all burst out laughing and that laugh we hadn’t thought of repressing raised our spirits and cheered us up.
That bulldog of a Lacroix had frowned when the unfortunate girl had bellowed her ‘But here I be!’ of distress and had replied:
‘Who’s denying it?’
As a result, she was in a pitiable state.