Villette
sarcasm, flavoured with contemptuous bitterness for the ringleaders,
and relieved with easy banter for the weaker but less knavish
followers, it seemed to me that one might possibly get command over
this wild herd, and bring them into training, at least. All I could now
do was to walk up to Blanche—Mademoiselle de Melcy, a young baronne—the
eldest, tallest, handsomest, and most vicious—stand before her desk,
take from under her hand her exercise-book, remount the estrade,
deliberately read the composition, which I found very stupid, and, as
deliberately, and in the face of the whole school, tear the blotted
page in two.
This action availed to draw attention and check noise. One girl alone,
quite in the background, persevered in the riot with undiminished
energy. I looked at her attentively. She had a pale face, hair like
night, broad strong eyebrows, decided features, and a dark, mutinous,
sinister eye: I noted that she sat close by a little door, which door,
I was well aware, opened into a small closet where books were kept. She
was standing up for the purpose of conducting her clamour with freer
energies. I measured her stature and calculated her strength. She
seemed both tall and wiry; but, so the conflict were brief and the
attack unexpected, I thought I might manage her.
Advancing up the room, looking as cool and careless as I possibly
could, in short, _ayant l’air de rien_, I slightly pushed the door and
found it was ajar. In an instant, and with sharpness, I had turned on
her. In another instant she occupied the closet, the door was shut, and
the key in my pocket.
It so happened that this girl, Dolores by name, and a Catalonian by
race, was the sort of character at once dreaded and hated by all her
associates; the act of summary justice above noted proved popular:
there was not one present but, in her heart, liked to see it done. They
were stilled for a moment; then a smile—not a laugh—passed from desk to
desk: then—when I had gravely and tranquilly returned to the estrade,
courteously requested silence, and commenced a dictation as if nothing
at all had happened—the pens travelled peacefully over the pages, and
the remainder of the lesson passed in order and industry.
“C’est bien,” said Madame Beck, when I came out of class, hot and a
little exhausted. “Ca ira.”
She had been listening and peeping through a spy-hole the whole time.
From that day I ceased to be nursery governess, and became English
teacher. Madame raised my salary; but she got thrice the work out of me
she had extracted from Mr. Wilson, at half the expense.
CHAPTER IX.
ISIDORE.
My time was now well and profitably filled up. What with teaching
others and studying closely myself, I had hardly a spare moment. It was
pleasant. I felt I was getting on; not lying the stagnant prey of
mould and rust, but polishing my faculties and whetting them to a keen
edge with constant use. Experience of a certain kind lay before me, on
no narrow scale. Villette is a cosmopolitan city, and in this school
were girls of almost every European nation, and likewise of very varied
rank in life. Equality is much practised in Labassecour; though not
republican in form, it is nearly so in substance, and at the desks of
Madame Beck’s establishment the young countess and the young bourgeoise
sat side by side. Nor could you always by outward indications decide
which was noble and which plebeian; except that, indeed, the latter had
often franker and more courteous manners, while the former bore away
the bell for a delicately-balanced combination of insolence and deceit.
In the former there was often quick French blood mixed with the
marsh-phlegm: I regret to say that the effect of this vivacious fluid
chiefly appeared in the oilier glibness with which flattery and fiction
ran from the tongue, and in a manner lighter and livelier, but quite
heartless and insincere.
To do all parties justice, the honest aboriginal Labassecouriennes had
an hypocrisy of their own, too; but it was of a coarse order, such as
could deceive few. Whenever a lie was necessary for their occasions,
they brought it out with a careless ease and breadth altogether
untroubled by the rebuke of conscience. Not a soul in Madame Beck’s
house, from the scullion to the directress herself, but was above being
ashamed of a lie; they thought nothing of it: to invent might not be
precisely a virtue, but it was the most venial of faults. “J’ai menti
plusieurs fois,” formed an item of every girl’s and woman’s monthly
confession: the priest heard unshocked, and absolved unreluctant. If
they had missed going to mass, or read a chapter of a novel, that was
another thing: these were crimes whereof rebuke and penance were the
unfailing weed.
While yet but half-conscious of this state of things, and unlearned in
its results, I got on in my new sphere very well. After the first few
difficult lessons, given amidst peril and on the edge of a moral
volcano that rumbled under my feet and sent sparks and hot fumes into
my eyes, the eruptive spirit seemed to subside, as far as I was
concerned. My mind was a good deal bent on success: I could not bear
the thought of being baffled by mere undisciplined disaffection and
wanton indocility, in this first attempt to get on in life. Many hours
of the night I used to lie awake, thinking what plan I had best adopt
to get a reliable hold on these mutineers, to bring this stiff-necked
tribe under permanent influence. In the first place, I saw plainly
that aid in no shape was to be expected from Madame: her righteous plan
was to maintain an unbroken popularity with the pupils, at any and
every cost of justice or comfort to the teachers. For a teacher to seek
her alliance in any crisis of insubordination was equivalent to
securing her own expulsion. In intercourse with her pupils, Madame only
took to herself what was pleasant, amiable, and recommendatory; rigidly
requiring of her lieutenants sufficiency for every annoying crisis,
where to act with adequate promptitude was to be unpopular. Thus, I
must look only to myself.
Imprimis—it was clear as the day that this swinish multitude were not
to be driven by force. They were to be humoured, borne with very
patiently: a courteous though sedate manner impressed them; a very rare
flash of raillery did good. Severe or continuous mental application
they could not, or would not, bear: heavy demand on the memory, the
reason, the attention, they rejected point-blank. Where an English girl
of not more than average capacity and docility would quietly take a
theme and bind herself to the task of comprehension and mastery, a
Labassecourienne would laugh in your face, and throw it back to you
with the phrase,—“Dieu, que c’est difficile! Je n’en veux pas. Cela
m’ennuie trop.”
A teacher who understood her business would take it back at once,
without hesitation, contest, or expostulation—proceed with even
exaggerated care to smoothe every difficulty, to reduce it to the level
of their understandings, return it to them thus modified, and lay on
the lash of sarcasm with unsparing hand. They would feel the sting,
perhaps wince a little under it; but they bore no malice against this
sort of attack, provided the sneer was not _sour_, but _hearty_, and
that it held well up to them, in a clear, light, and bold type, so that
she who ran might read, their incapacity, ignorance, and sloth. They
would riot for three additional lines to a lesson; but I never knew
them rebel against a wound given to their self-respect: the little they
had of that quality was trained to be crushed, and it rather liked the
pressure of a firm heel than otherwise.
By degrees, as I acquired fluency and freedom in their language, and
could make such application of its more nervous idioms as suited their
case, the elder and more intelligent girls began rather to like me in
their way: I noticed that whenever a pupil had been roused to feel in
her soul the stirring of worthy emulation, or the quickening of honest
shame, from that date she was won. If I could but once make their
(usually large) ears burn under their thick glossy hair, all was
comparatively well. By-and-by bouquets began to be laid on my desk in
the morning; by way of acknowledgment for this little foreign
attention, I used sometimes to walk with a select few during
recreation. In the course of conversation it befel once or twice that I
made an unpremeditated attempt to rectify some of their singularly
distorted notions of principle; especially I expressed my ideas of the
evil and baseness of a lie. In an unguarded moment, I chanced to say
that, of the two errors; I considered falsehood worse than an
occasional lapse in church-attendance. The poor girls were tutored to
report in Catholic ears whatever the Protestant teacher said. An
edifying consequence ensued. Something—an unseen, an indefinite, a
nameless—something stole between myself and these my best pupils: the
bouquets continued to be offered, but conversation thenceforth became
impracticable. As I paced the alleys or sat in the berceau, a girl
never came to my right hand but a teacher, as if by magic, appeared at
my left. Also, wonderful to relate, Madame’s shoes of silence brought
her continually to my back, as quick, as noiseless and unexpected, as
some wandering zephyr.
The opinion of my Catholic acquaintance concerning my spiritual
prospects was somewhat naïvely expressed to me on one occasion. A
pensionnaire, to whom I had rendered some little service, exclaimed one
day as she sat beside me: “Mademoiselle, what a pity you are a
Protestant!”
“Why, Isabelle?”
“Parceque, quand vous serez morte—vous brûlerez tout de suite dans
l’Enfer.”
“Croyez-vous?”
“Certainement que j’y crois: tout le monde le sait; et d’ailleurs le
prêtre me l’a dit.”
Isabelle was an odd, blunt little creature. She added, _sotto voce_:
“Pour assurer votre salut là-haut, on ferait bien de vous brûler toute
vive ici-bas.”
I laughed, as, indeed, it was impossible to do otherwise.
Has the reader forgotten Miss Ginevra Fanshawe? If so, I must be
allowed to re-introduce that young lady as a thriving pupil of Madame
Beck’s; for such she was. On her arrival in the Rue Fossette, two or
three days after my sudden settlement there, she encountered me with
very little surprise. She must have had good blood in her veins, for
never was any duchess more perfectly, radically, unaffectedly
_nonchalante_ than she: a weak, transient amaze was all she knew of the
sensation of wonder. Most of her other faculties seemed to be in the
same flimsy condition: her liking and disliking, her love and hate,
were mere cobweb and gossamer; but she had one thing about her that
seemed strong and durable enough, and that was—her selfishness.
She was not proud; and—_bonne d’enfants_ as I was—she would forthwith
have made of me a sort of friend and confidant. She teased me with a
thousand vapid complaints about school-quarrels and household economy:
the cookery was not to her taste; the people about her, teachers and
pupils, she held to be despicable, because they were foreigners. I bore
with her abuse of the Friday’s salt fish and hard eggs—with her
invective against the soup, the bread, the coffee—with some patience
for a time; but at last, wearied by iteration, I turned crusty, and put
her to rights: a thing I ought to have done in the very beginning, for
a salutary setting down always agreed with her.
Much longer had I to endure her demands on me in the way of work. Her
wardrobe, so far as concerned articles of external wear, was well and
elegantly supplied; but there were other habiliments not so carefully
provided: what she had, needed frequent repair. She hated
needle-drudgery herself, and she would bring her hose, &c. to me in