Anais, Luce, and a few others luckily had a good aural memory and, after the third repetition, could follow me with their voices.
We stopped because Mademoiselle said:
‘Enough for today’ – it would have been too cruel to make us sing for long in that African temperature.
‘And, one other thing,’ added Mademoiselle. ‘It’s forbidden to hum the Hymn to Nature between lessons.
Otherwise you’ll murder it, you’ll distort it out of all knowledge and you’ll be incapable of singing it properly at the prizegiving.
Get on with your needlework now and don’t let me hear you talking too loud.’
They kept us big ones out of doors so that we could execute in greater comfort the marvellous pieces of needlecraft destined for the exhibition of hand work! (Could these works be done in any way except ‘by hand’? I don’t know of any ‘foot work’.) For, after the distribution of prizes, the entire town would come and admire the display of our work.
Two classrooms would be filled with samples of lace, tapestry, and beribboned lingerie laid out on the study-tables.
The walls would be hung with open-work curtains, crochet bedspreads mounted on coloured linings, bedside rugs of green wool moss (in brushed-up knitting) dotted with imitation red and pink flowers, also in wool and with chimney-piece borders in embroidered plush … These grown-up little girls liked the underclothes they displayed to be glamorous, so their main exhibits consisted of sumptuous pieces of lingerie – batiste chemises embroidered with tiny flowers, with marvellous yokes; frilly drawers gartered with ribbons; camisoles scalloped top and bottom – all displayed over linings of red, blue, and mauve paper with labels on which the maker’s name was inscribed in beautiful round handwriting.
All along the walls were ranged stools worked in cross-stitch on which reposed either the horrible cat whose eyes were made of four green stitches with a black one in the middle or the dog with the crimson back and the purplish paws, from whose mouth lolled a turkey-red tongue.
Obviously it was the underclothes that principally interested the boys who came, like everyone else, to see the exhibition. They lingered over the flowered chemises and the beribboned knickers, nudged each other, laughed and whispered monstrous comments.
It is only fair to say that the Boys’ School boasted its own exhibition, rivalling our own.
If they did not offer exciting lingerie for public admiration, they displayed other marvels; cleverly-turned table-legs, twisted columns (my dear! they’re the most difficult of all), samples of woodwork in ‘dovetailing’, cardboard boxes dripping with glue, and, above all, clay models – the joy of the Headmaster who modestly christens this room ‘Sculpture Section’ – models which claim to reproduce the friezes of the Parthenon and other bas-reliefs but are all blurred, bloated and pitiable.
The Drawing Section is no more consoling: the heads of the Brigands of the Abruzzi squint, the King of Rome has a boil, Nero grimaces horribly, and President Loubet in a tricolour frame (woodwork and paste-board combined) obviously wants to be sick (because he’s thinking about his minister, explains Dutertre, still furious at not being a Deputy). On the walls, grubby wash-drawings, architectural plans, and the ‘anticipated (sic) general view of the Exhibition of 1900’ – a water-colour which deserves the prize of honour.
So, during the time that still separates us from the holidays, we shall leave all our books on the shelf, we shall work lazily in the shade of the walls, incessantly washing our hands – a pretext to go for a stroll – so as not to stain light wools and white fabrics – with damp fingers. All I am exhibiting is three pink lawn chemises, cut like a baby’s, with matching knickers – closed ones.
This last detail scandalizes my companions who unanimously find it ‘indecent’ – on my word of honour!
I installed myself between Luce and Anais who herself was sitting next to Marie Belhomme for, from force of habit, we keep together in a little group.
Poor Marie!
She had to work again for the exam in October … Since she was fretting to death in the classroom, Mademoiselle took pity on her and let her come with us; she sat there reading Atlases and Histories of France; when I say ‘reading’ – her book was open on her knees, she bent her head and glanced sideways in our direction, straining her ears to catch everything we said.
I could foresee the result of the October exam!
‘I’m parched with thirst!
Have you got your bottle?’ Anais asked me.
‘No, didn’t think of bringing it, but Marie’s sure to have hers.’
Still another of our immutable, absurd customs, those bottles.
As soon as the weather turned really hot, it was agreed that the water in the pump became undrinkable (it is at any season), and each one brought along a bottle of some cool drink at the bottom of her little basket – sometimes in her leather satchel or her canvas bag.
There was great rivalry as to who could produce the most fantastic mixture and the most unnatural liquid.
No cocoa, that was for the baby class!
For us water mixed with vinegar which blanches the lips and gnaws at the stomach; acid lemonades; mint drinks, confected oneself with the fresh leaves of the plant; brandy, pinched from home and thickened with sugar; the astringent juice of green gooseberries that made one’s mouth water.
The lanky Anais bitterly deplored the departure of the chemist’s daughter who at one time used to provide us with bottles of spirits of peppermint diluted with far too little water, or sometimes with a patent concoction called eau de Botot.
I myself, being a simple nature, confined myself to drinking white wine with a dash of Seltzer water, sugar, and a little lemon.
Anais indulged too freely in vinegar and Marie in extract of liquorice, so concentrated that it was almost black.
As the use of bottles was forbidden, each one, I repeat, brought her own, stoppered with a cork through which was thrust a quill. This arrangement allowed us to drink by bending forward on the pretext of picking up a cotton-reel, without displacing the bottle lying in its basket, its beak sticking out.
At the little quarter-of-an-hour recreation (at half past nine and half past three), everyone rushed to the pump to pour water over the bottles and cool them a little.
Three years ago, a little girl fell down with her bottle and blinded herself in one eye; her eye is all white now.
After this accident, they confiscated all the receptacles, every single one, for the space of a week … then someone brought hers back, an example followed by someone else the next day … and, a month later, the bottles were functioning regularly again.
Perhaps Mademoiselle did not know of this accident which happened long before her arrival – or else she preferred to shut her eyes so that we should leave her in peace.
Nothing has been happening, to tell the truth.
The heat has taken away all our high spirits.
Luce besieges me less with her importune caresses; inclinations to quarrel hardly arise before they die down at once; it is general slackness, of course, and the sudden storms of July that catch us unawares in the playground and sweep us away under tremendous downpours of hail. An hour later, the sky is cloudless.
We played a wicked joke on Marie Belhomme, who had boasted of coming to school without any drawers on, on account of the heat.
There were four of us, one afternoon, sitting on a bench in the following order: Marie – Anais – Luce – Claudine.
After having had my plan duly explained to them in undertones, my two neighbours got up to wash their hands and the middle of the bench remained empty, leaving Marie at one end and me at the other.
She was half asleep over her arithmetic.
I got up suddenly; the bench tipped over: Marie, startled awake, fell, her legs in the air, with one of those squawks like a slaughtered hen which are her personal speciality, and showed us … that she was, indeed, wearing no drawers.
There was an outburst of howls and tremendous laughs; the Headmistress wanted to lecture us but could not, being in fits of laughter herself.
Aimee Lanthenay preferred to take herself off so as not to present her pupils with the sight of herself writhing like a poisoned cat.
Dutertre had not been here for ages.
He was said to be at some bathing-resort where he was basking in the sun and flirting (but where did he get the money?).
I could just see him in white flannels, wearing belts that were too broad and shoes that were too yellow; he adores those rather flashy get-ups.
He would look very much of a flashy adventurer himself in those light colours – his face too sun-tanned and his eyes too bright – with his pointed teeth and his black moustache that has a rusty look as if it has been singed.