We made ourselves comfortable; Anais left off her apron and turned up her sleeves like a pastry-cook; little Luce, who hopped and ran behind me all day long, had pulled up her dress and her petticoat like a washerwoman, a pretext for displaying her rounded calves and slender ankles.
Mademoiselle, moved to pity, had allowed Marie Belhomme to shut away her books. Wearing a linen blouse with black and white stripes and looking, as usual, rather like a Pierrot, she flapped around with us, cutting the strips crooked, making mistakes, catching her feet in the wire, in utter despair or swooning with joy all in the same minute, but so gentle and inoffensive that we didn’t even tease her.
Mademoiselle Sergent stood up and with a brusque gesture drew the curtain on the side that overlooked the boys’ playground.
We could hear, from the school opposite, the braying of harsh, badly-pitched young voices; it was Monsieur Rabastens teaching his pupils a Republican song.
Mademoiselle waited a moment or two, then waved her arm. The obliging Antonin promptly came running up, bareheaded, with a La France rose adorning his buttonhole.
‘Would you be kind enough to send two of your boys over to the workshop and make them cut this brass-wire into lengths of twenty-five centimetres?’
‘Rright away, Mademoiselle!
Are you still working at your flowers?’
‘We shan’t be finished for a long time; it needs five thousand roses for the school alone and we’re also commissioned to decorate the banqueting room!’
Rabastens went off, running bareheaded under the ferocious sun.
A quarter of an hour later, there was a knock on our door which opened to admit two big boobies of fourteen or fifteen, bringing back the lengths of wire.
Not knowing what to do with their lanky bodies, they stood there, red-faced and stupid, excited to find themselves in the midst of fifty little girls who, bare-necked and bare-armed, with their bodices undone, laughed mischievously at the two boys.
Anais brushed against them in passing, I gently stuffed serpentine trails of paper into their pockets; they escaped at last, both pleased and sorry, while Mademoiselle was prodigal of ‘Shs’s’ to which we paid scant attention.
Along with Anais, I was a folder and cutter; Luce tied up the bundles and carried them to the Headmistress; Marie put them in a heap.
At eleven in the morning, we left everything and formed into a group to rehearse the Hymn to Nature.
Towards five o’clock, we smartened ourselves up a little; tiny mirrors emerged from pockets; some smaller fry of the Second Class obligingly stretched their black aprons behind the panes of an open window and, in front of this sombre looking-glass, we put on our hats again, I fluffed up my curls, Anais pinned up her collapsing chignon, and we went off home.
The town was beginning to be as stirred-up as we were; just think, Monsieur Jean Dupuy was arriving in six days’ time!
The boys went off in the morning in carts, singing at the top of their lungs and whipping the sorry steed in the shafts with all their might. They went out into the municipal wood – and into private woods too, I’m quite sure – to choose their trees and mark them; firs in particular, elms and velvety-leaved aspens would perish in hundreds; at all costs, honour must be done to this newly-made Minister!
In the evening, in the square and on the pavements, the girls crumpled paper roses and sang to attract the boys to come and help them.
Good heavens, how they must speed the task!
I could see them from here, going at it with both hands!
Carpenters removed the mobile screens from the great room in the Town Hall where the banquet was to be held; a huge platform sprouted in the courtyard.
The district Doctor-Superintendent Dutertre made brief and frequent appearances, approved everything that was being built, slapped the men on the back, chucked the women under the chin, stood drinks all round and disappeared, soon to return.
Happy countryside!
During this time, the woods were ravaged, poaching went on day and night, there were brawls in the taverns and a cow-girl at Chene-Fendu gave her newborn child to the pigs to eat. (After a few days, they stopped the prosecution, Dutertre having succeeded in proving that the girl was not responsible for her actions … Already, no one bothered any more about the affair.) Thanks to these methods, he was poisoning the countryside but, out of a couple of hundred scoundrels, he had constituted himself a bodyguard who would murder and die for him.
He would be made a Deputy. What else mattered!
As for us, good heavens! We made roses.
Five or six thousand roses is no light matter.
The little ones’ class was busy to the last child making garlands of pleated paper in pastel colours which would float all over the place at the whim of the breeze.
Mademoiselle was afraid that these preparations would not be finished in time and gave us provisions of tissue paper and wire to take away every afternoon when school was over.
We worked at home, after dinner, before dinner, without respite; the tables in all our houses were loaded with roses – white, blue, red, pink, and yellow ones – full-blown, crisp and fresh on the end of their stalks.
They took up so much room that one didn’t know where to put them; they overflowed everywhere, blooming in multi-coloured heaps, and we carried them back in the morning in sheaves, looking as if we were going to wish relatives a happy birthday.
The Headmistress, bubbling over with ideas, also wants to construct a triumphal arch at the entrance to the Schools: the side-pillars are to be built up with pine-branches and dishevelled greenery, stuck with quantities of roses.
The pediment is to bear this inscription, in letters of pink roses on a ground of moss:
WELCOME TO OUR VISITORS!
Charming, isn’t it?
I’ve had my inspiration too. I have suggested the idea of crowning the flag – meaning us three – with flowers.
‘Oh, yes,’ Anais and Marie Belhomme screeched delightedly.
‘That’s fixed then. (Hang the expense!) Anais, you’ll be crowned with poppies; Marie, you’ll be diademmed with cornflowers and, as for me, whiteness, candour, purity, I shall wear …’
‘What? Orange blossom?’
‘I’ve still a right to it, Miss!
More than you have, no doubt!’
‘Do lilies seem immaculate enough to you?’
‘You make me sick!
I shall choose marguerites; you know perfectly well the tricolour bouquet is made up of marguerites, poppies, and cornflowers.
Let’s go down to the milliner’s.’
Looking disdainful and superior, we made our choice. The milliner took our head measurements and promised ‘the very best that could be made’.
The next day we received three wreaths which grieved me to the heart; diadems that bulged in the middle like the ones country brides wear; how on earth could one look pretty in that?
Marie and Anais, enraptured, tried theirs on in the midst of an admiring circle of juniors; I said nothing, but I took my accessory home where I quietly took it to pieces.
Then, on the same wire frame, I reconstructed a fragile, slender wreath with the big, starry marguerites placed as if by chance, ready to drop away; two or three flowers hung in bunches about my ears, a few trailed behind in my hair; then I tried my creation on my head.