She rolled her eyes so furiously that I bit back the retort
‘It’s the first time since last year’, for I was afraid Mademoiselle Lanthenay might suffer for my impertinence. So I opened my History of France without answering a word.
This evening I should be having my English lesson and that would console me for my silence.
At four o’clock, Mademoiselle Aimee appeared and we went off happily together.
How nice it was there with her in the warm library!
I pulled my chair right up against hers and laid my head on her shoulder.
She put her arm round me and I squeezed her supple waist.
‘Darling little Mademoiselle, it’s such ages since I’ve seen you!’
‘But … it’s only three days …’
‘What does that matter? … Don’t talk, and kiss me!
You’re very unkind; time seems short to you when you’re away from me … Do they bore you frightfully, these lessons?’
‘Oh, Claudine! On the contrary, you know you’re the only person I can ever really talk to and I’m only happy when I’m here.’
She kissed me and I purred. Then, suddenly, I hugged her so violently that she gave a little shriek.
‘Claudine, we must work!’
I wished English grammar to the devil!
I much preferred to lay my head on her breast while she stroked my hair or my neck and I could hear her heart beat breathlessly under my ear.
How I loved being with her!
Nevertheless, I had to take up a pen and at least pretend to be working!
But really, what was the point?
Who could possibly come in?
Papa?
Nothing less likely!
Papa shuts himself up like a hermit in the most uncomfortable room on the first floor, the one where you freeze in winter and roast in summer and there he remains blindly absorbed, deaf to the noises of the world, busy with … But, of course … you haven’t read because it’ll never be finished, his great work on the Malacology of the Region of Fresnois and you’ll never know that, after complicated experiments and anxious vigils that have kept him bending for hours and hours over innumerable slugs enclosed in little bell-glasses and wire cages, Papa has established the following epoch-making fact: in one day, a limax flavus devours as much as 0.24 grammes of food whereas the helix ventricosa only consumes 0.19 grammes in the same time!
How could you expect that the budding hope of such discoveries would leave a passionate malacologist any paternal sentiment between seven in the morning and nine at night?
He’s the best and kindest of men – between two orgies of slugs.
Moreover, he watches me live – when he has time to – with positive admiration. He’s astonished to see me existing ‘like a real human being’.
This fact makes him laugh, with his small deep-set eyes and his noble Bourbon nose (wherever did he get that royal nose?) into his handsome beard that’s streaked with three colours – red, grey, and white. And how often I’ve seen that beard shining with traces of slime from the slugs!
I asked Aimee carelessly whether she’d seen the two friends, Rabastens and Richelieu, again.
She became excited, which surprised me:
‘Ah! I forgot, I hadn’t told you … You know we sleep over at the infant-school now because they’re pulling down everything … Well, yesterday evening, I was working in my room round about ten o’clock and when I was closing the shutters before going to bed, I saw a tall shadow walking to and fro under my window, in all this cold!
Guess who it was!’
‘One of those two, of course.’
‘Yes! But it was Armand.
Would you ever have believed it of that shy chap?’
I said no, but actually I didn’t find it at all hard to believe. That tall, dark creature with the sombre, serious eyes seemed to me much less of a nonentity than the hearty Marseillais.
Nevertheless I saw that Mademoiselle Aimee’s bird-like head was completely turned by this mild adventure.
I asked her:
‘What?
Do you already find him as interesting as all that, that solemn crow?’
‘No, of course not!
I’m amused, that’s all.’
That was that, and the lesson ended without further confidences.
It was only when we went out into the dark passage that I kissed her with all my might on her charming slim white neck and in the tendrils of her hair that smelt so nice.
She’s as amusing to kiss as a warm, pretty little animal and she returned my kisses tenderly.
Oh, I’d have kept her with me all the time if only I could!
Tomorrow would be Sunday. No school. What a bore!
It’s the only place I find amusing.
That particular Sunday, I went to spend the afternoon where Claire lives – my sweet, gentle partner at my First Communion. She hasn’t been coming to school for a year now.
We walked down the Chemin des Matignons which runs into the road leading to the station.
It’s a lane that’s leafy and dark with greenery in summer; in these winter months there aren’t any leaves, of course, but you’re still sufficiently hidden there to be able to spy on the people sitting on the benches along the road.