At least I only eat cigarette-paper and only one special kind of that.
But that gawk Anais ruins the store from which they give out the school stationery. She asks for new ‘equipment’ every single week to such an extent that, at the beginning of term, the Municipal Council made a complaint.)
Dutertre shook his snow-powdered furs – they looked like his natural hide. Mademoiselle Sergent sparkled with such joy at the sight of him that it didn’t even occur to her to notice if I were watching her.
He cracked jokes with her and his quick, resonant voice (he speaks with the accent they have up in the mountains) seemed to warm up the whole classroom.
I inspected my nails and let my hair be well in evidence, for the visitor was directing most of his glances at us. After all, we’re big girls of fifteen and if my face looks younger than my age, my figure looks eighteen at least.
And my hair is worth showing off, too. It makes a curly flying mass whose colour varies according to the season between dull chestnut and deep gold, and contrasts, by no means unattractively, with my coffee-brown eyes.
Curly, as it is, it comes down almost to my hips. I’ve never worn plaits or a chignon. Chignons give me a headache and plaits don’t frame my face enough.
When we play prisoners’ base, I gather up my heap of hair, which would make me too easy a victim, and tie it up in a horse’s tail.
Well, after all, isn’t it prettier like that?
Mademoiselle Sergent finally broke off her raptured conversation with the District Superintendent and rapped out a:
‘Girls, you are behaving extremely badly!’
To confirm her in this conviction, Anais thought it helped to let out the ‘Hpp …’ of suppressed hysterical giggles without moving a muscle in her face. So it was at me that Mademoiselle shot a furious glance which boded punishment.
At last Monsieur Dutertre raised his voice and we heard him ask:
‘They’re working well, here?
They’re keeping well?’
‘They’re keeping extremely well,’ replied Mademoiselle Sergent. ‘But they do little enough work.
The laziness of those big girls is incredible!’
The moment we saw the handsome doctor turn towards us, we all bent over our work with an air of intense application as if we were too absorbed to remember he was there.
‘Ah! Ah!’ he said, coming towards our benches. ‘So we don’t do much work?
What ideas have we in our heads?
Is Mademoiselle Claudine no longer top in French composition?’
Those French compositions, how I loathe them!
Such stupid and disgusting subjects:
‘Imagine the thoughts and actions of a young blind girl.’ (Why not deaf and dumb as well?) Or:
‘Write, so as to draw your own physical and moral portrait, to a brother whom you have not seen for ten years.’ (I have no fraternal bonds, I am an only child.) No one will ever know the efforts I have to make to restrain myself from writing pure spoof or highly subversive opinions!
But, for all that, my companions – all except Anais – make such a hash of it that, in spite of myself I am ‘the outstanding pupil in literary composition.’
Dutertre had now arrived at the point he wanted to arrive at and I raised my head as Mademoiselle Sergent answered him.
‘Claudine?
Oh, she’s still top.
But it’s not her fault. She’s gifted for that and doesn’t need to make any effort.’
He sat down on the table, swinging one leg and addressing me as tu so as not to lose the habit of doing so.
‘So you’re lazy?’
‘Of course.
It’s my only pleasure in the world.’
‘You don’t mean that seriously!
You prefer reading, eh?
What do you read?
Everything you can lay hands on?
Everything in your father’s library?’
‘No, Sir. Not books that bore me.’
‘I bet you’re teaching yourself some remarkable things.
Give me your exercise-book.’
To read it more comfortably, he leant a hand on my shoulder and twisted a curl of my hair.
This made the lanky Anais turn dangerously yellow; he had not asked for her exercise-book!
I should pay for this favouritism by surreptitious pin-pricks, sly tale-telling to Mademoiselle Sergent, and being spied on whenever I talked to Mademoiselle Lanthenay.
She was standing near the door of the small classroom, that charming Aimee, and she smiled at me so tenderly with her golden eyes that I was almost consoled for not having been able to talk to her today or yesterday except in front of my schoolmates.
Dutertre laid down my exercise-book and stroked my shoulders in an absent-minded way.
He was not thinking in the least about what he was doing, evidently … oh, very evidently …
‘How old are you?’
‘Fifteen.’