‘Funny little girl!
If you didn’t look so crazy, you’d seem older, you know.
You’ll sit for your certificate next October?’
‘Yes, Sir, to please Papa.’
‘Your father?
What on earth does it matter to him?
But you yourself, you’re not particularly eager at the prospect?’
‘Oh yes, I am. It’ll amuse me to see all those people who question us.
And besides there are concerns in the town then.
It’ll be fun.’
‘You won’t go on to the training-college?’
I leapt in my seat.
‘Good heavens, no!’
‘Why so emphatic, you excitable girl?’
‘I don’t want to go there any more than I wanted to go to boarding-school – because you’re shut up.’
‘Oho! Your liberty means as much as all that to you, does it?
Your husband won’t have things all his own way, poor fellow!
Show me that face.
Are you keeping well?
A trifle anaemic, perhaps?’
This kindly doctor turned me towards the window, slipped his arm round me and gazed searchingly into my eyes with his wolfish stare.
I made my own gaze frank and devoid of mystery.
I always have dark circles under my eyes and he asked me if I suffered from palpitations and breathlessness.
‘No, never.’
I lowered my lids because if felt I was blushing idiotically.
Also he was staring at me too hard!
And I was conscious of Mademoiselle Sergent behind us, her nerves tense.
‘Do you sleep all night?’
I was furious at blushing more than ever as I answered:
‘Oh, yes, Sir. All night long.’
He did not press the point but stood upright and let go my waist.
‘Tcha! Fundamentally, you’re as sound as a bell.’
A little caress on my cheek, then he went on to the lanky Anais who was withering on her bench.
‘Show me your exercise-book.’
While he turned over the pages, pretty fast, Mademoiselle Sergent was fulminating in an undertone at the First Division (girls of twelve and fourteen who were already beginning to pinch in their waists and wear chignons), for the First Division had taken advantage of authority’s inattention to indulge in a Witches’ Sabbath. We could hear hands being smacked with rulers, the squeals of girls who were being pinched.
They were letting themselves in for a general detention, not a doubt of it!
Anais was suffocated with joy at seeing her exercise-book in such august hands but no doubt Dutertre did not find her worth much attention for he passed on after paying her a few compliments and pinching her ear.
He lingered some minutes by Marie Belhomme whose smooth, dark freshness attracted him but she was promptly overwhelmed with shyness. She lowered her head like a ram, said Yes when she meant No and addressed Dutertre as ‘Mademoiselle’.
As to the two Jaubert sisters, he complimented them on their beautiful handwriting, as might have been foretold. At last, he left the room.
Good riddance!
We still had ten minutes to go before the end of class; how could we use use them?
I asked permission to leave the room so that I could surreptitiously gather up a handful of the still-falling snow.
I made a snowball and bit into it; it was cold and delicious.
It always smells a little of dust, this first fall.
I hid it in my pocket and returned to the classroom.
Everyone round me made signs to me and I passed the snowball round. Each of them, with the exception of the virtuous twins, bit into it with expressions of rapture.
Then that ninny of a Marie Belhomme had to go and drop the last bit and Mademoiselle Sergent saw it.
‘Claudine!
Have you gone and brought in snow again?
This is really getting beyond the limit!’