I hear your voice better. And your voice is charming."
Sometimes it was he who interrupted me.
After concentrating his thoughts, he slowly recited, with a prolongation of the rhythms, the lines that had excited in him the greatest enthusiasm, and he tried—oh! how I loved him for that!—to make me understand them, to make me feel their beauty.
One day he said to me,—and I have kept these words as a relic:
"The sublimity of poetry, you see, lies in the fact that it does not take an educated person to understand it and to love it. On the contrary. The educated do not understand it, and generally they despise it, because they have too much pride.
To love poetry it is enough to have a soul,—a little soul, naked, like a flower. Poets speak to the souls of the simple, of the sad, of the sick. And that is why they are eternal.
Do you know that, when one has sensibility, one is always something of a poet?
And you yourself, little Celestine, have often said to me things that are as beautiful as poetry."
"Oh! Monsieur Georges, you are making fun of me."
"Not in the least.
And you are unaware that you have said these beautiful things.
And that is the delightful part of it."
For me those were unique hours; whatever destiny may bring me, they will sing in my heart as long as I may live. I felt that indescribably sweet sensation of becoming a new being, of witnessing, so to speak, from minute to minute, the revelation of something unknown in me, and which yet was I. And to-day, in spite of worse falls, thoroughly reconquered as I am by all that is bad and embittered in me, if I have kept this passionate fondness for reading, and sometimes that impulse toward things superior to my social environment and to myself; if, trying to regain confidence in the spontaneity of my nature, I have dared—I who am so ignorant—to write this diary,—it is to M. Georges that I owe it.
Oh! yes, I was happy,—happy especially at seeing the pretty patient gradually reborn, his flesh swelling out and his face blooming again, through the flow of a new sap; happy at the joy, and the hopes, and the certainties, that the rapidity of this resurrection gave to the entire house, of which I was now the queen and the fairy.
They attributed to me, they attributed to the intelligence of my care, to the vigilance of my devotion, and, more still perhaps, to my constant gaiety, to my youth so full of charm, to my surprising influence over Georges, this incomparable miracle.
And the poor grandmother thanked me, overwhelmed me with gratitude and blessings, and also with presents, like a nurse to whom has been confided a baby almost dead, and who, with her pure and healthy milk, reconstructs his organs, brings back his smile, and restores him to life.
Sometimes, forgetful of her station, she took my hands, caressed them, kissed them, and, with tears of joy, said to me:
"I knew very well ... I ... when I saw you ... I knew very well!"
And already projects were being formed,—journeys to the land of sunshine, fields full of roses!
"You shall never leave us; never more, my child."
Her enthusiasm often embarrassed me, but I finally came to believe that I deserved it.
If, as many others would have done in my place, I had chosen to abuse her generosity ... Oh, misfortune!
And what was to happen happened.
On the day of which I speak, the weather had been very warm, very heavy, and very threatening.
Across the sky, above the leaden and perfectly flat sea, rolled stifling clouds, thick red clouds, through which the storm could not break.
M. Georges had not gone out, even to the terrace, and we had remained in his room.
More nervous than usual, a nervousness due undoubtedly to the electricity in the atmosphere, he had even refused to let me read poetry to him.
"That would tire me," he said.
"And, besides, I feel that you would read very badly to-day."
He had gone into the salon, where he had tried to play a little on the piano.
The piano having plagued him, he had at once come back into the room, where he had sought to divert himself for a moment by drawing, as it seemed to me, some feminine profiles.
But he had not been slow in abandoning paper and pencil, fuming with some impatience:
"I cannot; I am not in the mood. My hand trembles. I don't know what is the matter with me. And you,—there is something the matter with you, too. You are restless."
Finally he had stretched himself on his long chair, near the large bay-window, through which one could see a vast expanse of water.
Fishing-boats in the distance, fleeing from the ever-threatening storm, were re-entering the port of Trouville.
With a distracted look he followed their manoeuvres and their grey sails.
As M. Georges had said, I was restless; I could not keep still; I was continually moving about, to find something with which to occupy his mind.
Of course I found nothing, and my agitation did not have a quieting influence on his.
"Why do you move about so?
Why do you enervate yourself?
Stay beside me."
I had asked him: "Would you not like to be on one of those little boats yonder? I would."
"Oh! do not talk for the sake of talking. Why say useless things? Stay beside me."
Scarcely had I taken my seat beside him, when, the sight of the sea becoming utterly unendurable to him, he asked me to lower the blind.
"This bad light exasperates me; this sea is horrible. I do not wish to look at it. Everything is horrible to-day.
I do not wish to see anything; I wish to see you only."
I had gently chided him.
"Oh! Monsieur Georges, you are not good. You are not behaving well. If your grandmother were to come in and see you in this condition, you would make her cry again."
Having raised himself a little on the cushions:
"In the first place, why do you call me 'Monsieur Georges'?