My stomach was crying out and I went off to lunch, delighted to see Fanchette again, and the garden, and Papa; my white Fanchette, who had been baking herself and growing thinner in the sunshine, welcomed me with sharp, surprised mews; the green garden, neglected and overgrown with plants which had strained upward and grown immensely tall to find the sunlight the great trees hid from them; and Papa who welcomed me with a hearty, affectionate slap in the hollow under my shoulder:
‘What on earth’s become of you?
I never see you these days!’
‘But, Papa, I’ve just come back from passing my exam.’
‘What exam?’
I assure you there is no one like him!
Obligingly, I recounted to him the adventures of the last few days, while he tugged his great red and white beard.
He seemed pleased.
No doubt, his experiments in cross-breeding slugs had furnished him with unhoped-for results.
I allowed myself four or five days of rest and of wandering over to the Matignons where I found Clare, my co-First Communicant, dripping with tears because her lover had just left Montigny without even deigning to inform her.
In a week she will possess another fiance who will leave her at the end of three months; she is not cunning enough to hold the boys and not practical enough to get herself married. And, as she obstinately insists on remaining virtuous, this may go on for a long time.
Meanwhile, she was looking after her twenty-five sheep, a slightly comic-opera, slightly absurd little shepherdess, with the big mushroom hat that protected her complexion and her chignon (the sun fades one’s hair, my dear!), her tiny blue apron embroidered in white, and the white novel, with its title En Fete! lettered in red, that she concealed in her basket. (It was I who had lent her the works of Auguste Germain to initiate her into Life!
Alas, maybe I shall be responsible for all the appalling errors she’ll commit.) I was convinced that she found herself poetically unhappy – a pathetic, deserted fiancee – and that, when she was by herself, she delighted in assuming nostalgic poses, ‘her arms dropped, like useless weapons’, or her head bowed, half-buried under her dishevelled hair.
While she was telling me the meagre news of the past four days, along with her misfortunes, it was I who kept an eye on the sheep and urged the bitch after them:
‘Fetch them, Lisette!
Fetch them over there!’ and I who uttered the warning ‘Prrr … my beauty!’ to stop them from touching the oats: I’m used to it.
‘When I found out what train he was leaving by,’ sighed Claire, ‘I arranged to leave my sheep with Lisette and I went down to the level crossing.
At the barrier, I waited for the train – it doesn’t go too fast there because it’s uphill.
I saw him, I waved my handkerchief, I blew him kisses, I think he saw me … Listen, I’m not certain, but it looked to me as if his eyes were red.
Perhaps his parents forced him to come back home … Perhaps he’ll write to me …’
Keep it up, romantic little thing, hope costs nothing.
If I tried to dissuade you, you wouldn’t believe me.
After five days of loafing about the woods, scratching my arms and legs on brambles, bringing home armfuls of wild pinks, cornflowers and campions, and eating bitter wild cherries and gooseberries, curiosity seized me again and I felt a homesick longing for the School.
So I went back to it again.
I found them all – that is the big ones – sitting on benches in the shade, working lazily at ‘exhibition pieces’; the little ones, under the covered-in part, were in process of splashing each other at the pump; Mademoiselle was in a wicker armchair, her Aimee at her feet on an inverted flower-box, lounging and whispering.
At my arrival, Mademoiselle Sergent started and swung round in her seat.
‘Ah, there you are!
That’s lucky!
You’ve certainly taken your time!
Mademoiselle Claudine runs wild in the fields without giving a though to the fact that the prizegiving is approaching and that the pupils don’t know a note of the part-song they’re supposed to be singing at it!’
‘But … isn’t Mademoiselle Aimee a singing-teacher then?
Isn’t Monsieur Rabastens (Antonin) one either?’
‘Don’t talk nonsense!
You know perfectly well that Mademoiselle Lanthenay can’t sing, her voice is too delicate to permit her to.
As to Monsieur Rabastens, apparently they’ve been gossiping in the town about his visits and his singing-lessons.
Good heavens, what a filthy hole this is for tittle-tattle!
The long and short of it is, he won’t be coming back.
We can’t do without you for the part-songs and you take advantage of the fact.
This afternoon, at four o’clock, we will divide up the parts and you will copy out the verses on the blackboard.’
‘I’m perfectly willing.
What’s the song this year?’
‘The Hymn to Nature.
Marie, go and get it – it’s on my desk.
Claudine is going to begin to din it into you.’
It was a chorus in three parts, the typical kind of thing that schoolgirls sing.
The sopranos twittered earnestly: ‘O’er the distant fields they ring, As the morning hymn they sing, Echoing sweetly to the sky …’
Meanwhile, the mezzos, echoing the rhymes in ‘ing’, repeat ‘ding, ding, ding’ to imitate the Angelus bell.
The audience would love it.
So that delightful life was about to begin; a life consisting in shouting myself hoarse, in singing the same tune three hundred times over, in returning home voiceless, in losing my temper with those little girls who were congenitally lacking in the faintest sense of rhythm.
If at least they gave me a present for doing all this!