Villette
there were pupils acute enough to discover that she had bedewed her
handkerchief and her hands with a new and fashionable perfume. Poor
Zélie! It was much her wont to declare about this time, that she was
tired to death of a life of seclusion and labour; that she longed to
have the means and leisure for relaxation; to have some one to work for
her—a husband who would pay her debts (she was woefully encumbered with
debt), supply her wardrobe, and leave her at liberty, as she said, to
“goûter un peu les plaisirs.” It had long been rumoured, that her eye
was upon M. Emanuel. Monsieur Emanuel’s eye was certainly often upon
her. He would sit and watch her perseveringly for minutes together. I
have seen him give her a quarter-of-an-hour’s gaze, while the class was
silently composing, and he sat throned on his estrade, unoccupied.
Conscious always of this basilisk attention, she would writhe under it,
half-flattered, half-puzzled, and Monsieur would follow her sensations,
sometimes looking appallingly acute; for in some cases, he had the
terrible unerring penetration of instinct, and pierced in its
hiding-place the last lurking thought of the heart, and discerned under
florid veilings the bare; barren places of the spirit: yes, and its
perverted tendencies, and its hidden false curves—all that men and
women would not have known—the twisted spine, the malformed limb that
was born with them, and far worse, the stain or disfigurement they have
perhaps brought on themselves. No calamity so accursed but M. Emanuel
could pity and forgive, if it were acknowledged candidly; but where his
questioning eyes met dishonest denial—where his ruthless researches
found deceitful concealment—oh, then, he could be cruel, and I thought
wicked! he would exultantly snatch the screen from poor shrinking
wretches, passionately hurry them to the summit of the mount of
exposure, and there show them all naked, all false—poor living lies—the
spawn of that horrid Truth which cannot be looked on unveiled. He
thought he did justice; for my part I doubt whether man has a right to
do such justice on man: more than once in these his visitations, I have
felt compelled to give tears to his victims, and not spared ire and
keen reproach to himself. He deserved it; but it was difficult to shake
him in his firm conviction that the work was righteous and needed.
Breakfast being over and mass attended, the school-bell rang and the
rooms filled: a very pretty spectacle was presented in classe. Pupils
and teachers sat neatly arrayed, orderly and expectant, each bearing in
her hand the bouquet of felicitation—the prettiest spring-flowers all
fresh, and filling the air with their fragrance: I only had no bouquet.
I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease
to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their
likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I
never wish to receive them from hands dear to me. Mademoiselle St.
Pierre marked my empty hands—she could not believe I had been so
remiss; with avidity her eye roved over and round me: surely I must
have some solitary symbolic flower somewhere: some small knot of
violets, something to win myself praise for taste, commendation for
ingenuity. The unimaginative “Anglaise” proved better than the
Parisienne’s fears: she sat literally unprovided, as bare of bloom or
leaf as the winter tree. This ascertained, Zélie smiled, well pleased.
“How wisely you have acted to keep your money, Miss Lucie,” she said:
“silly I have gone and thrown away two francs on a bouquet of hot-house
flowers!”
And she showed with pride her splendid nosegay.
But hush! a step: _the_ step. It came prompt, as usual, but with a
promptitude, we felt disposed to flatter ourselves, inspired by other
feelings than mere excitability of nerve and vehemence of intent. We
thought our Professor’s “foot-fall” (to speak romantically) had in it a
friendly promise this morning; and so it had.
He entered in a mood which made him as good as a new sunbeam to the
already well-lit first classe. The morning light playing amongst our
plants and laughing on our walls, caught an added lustre from M. Paul’s
all-benignant salute. Like a true Frenchman (though I don’t know why I
should say so, for he was of strain neither French nor Labassecourien),
he had dressed for the “situation” and the occasion. Not by the vague
folds, sinister and conspirator-like, of his soot-dark paletôt were the
outlines of his person obscured; on the contrary, his figure (such as
it was, I don’t boast of it) was well set off by a civilized coat and a
silken vest quite pretty to behold. The defiant and pagan bonnet-grec
had vanished: bare-headed, he came upon us, carrying a Christian hat in
his gloved hand. The little man looked well, very well; there was a
clearness of amity in his blue eye, and a glow of good feeling on his
dark complexion, which passed perfectly in the place of beauty: one
really did not care to observe that his nose, though far from small,
was of no particular shape, his cheek thin, his brow marked and square,
his mouth no rose-bud: one accepted him as he was, and felt his
presence the reverse of damping or insignificant.
He passed to his desk; he placed on the same his hat and gloves. “Bon
jour, mes amies,” said he, in a tone that somehow made amends to some
amongst us for many a sharp snap and savage snarl: not a jocund,
good-fellow tone, still less an unctuous priestly, accent, but a voice
he had belonging to himself—a voice used when his heart passed the
words to his lips. That same heart did speak sometimes; though an
irritable, it was not an ossified organ: in its core was a place,
tender beyond a man’s tenderness; a place that humbled him to little
children, that bound him to girls and women to whom, rebel as he would,
he could not disown his affinity, nor quite deny that, on the whole, he
was better with them than with his own sex.
“We all wish Monsieur a good day, and present to him our
congratulations on the anniversary of his fête,” said Mademoiselle
Zélie, constituting herself spokeswoman of the assembly; and advancing
with no more twists of affectation than were with her indispensable to
the achievement of motion, she laid her costly bouquet before him. He
bowed over it.
The long train of offerings followed: all the pupils, sweeping past
with the gliding step foreigners practise, left their tributes as they
went by. Each girl so dexterously adjusted her separate gift, that when
the last bouquet was laid on the desk, it formed the apex to a blooming
pyramid—a pyramid blooming, spreading, and towering with such
exuberance as, in the end, to eclipse the hero behind it. This ceremony
over, seats were resumed, and we sat in dead silence, expectant of a
speech.
I suppose five minutes might have elapsed, and the hush remained
unbroken; ten—and there was no sound.
Many present began, doubtless, to wonder for what Monsieur waited; as
well they might. Voiceless and viewless, stirless and wordless, he kept
his station behind the pile of flowers.
At last there issued forth a voice, rather deep, as if it spoke out of
a hollow:—
“Est-ce là tout?”
Mademoiselle Zélie looked round.
“You have all presented your bouquets?” inquired she of the pupils.
Yes; they had all given their nosegays, from the eldest to the
youngest, from the tallest to the most diminutive. The senior mistress
signified as much.
“Est-ce là tout?” was reiterated in an intonation which, deep before,
had now descended some notes lower.
“Monsieur,” said Mademoiselle St. Pierre, rising, and this time
speaking with her own sweet smile, “I have the honour to tell you that,
with a single exception, every person in classe has offered her
bouquet. For Meess Lucie, Monsieur will kindly make allowance; as a
foreigner she probably did not know our customs, or did not appreciate
their significance. Meess Lucie has regarded this ceremony as too
frivolous to be honoured by her observance.”
“Famous!” I muttered between my teeth: “you are no bad speaker, Zélie,
when you begin.”
The answer vouchsafed to Mademoiselle St Pierre from the estrade was
given in the gesticulation of a hand from behind the pyramid. This
manual action seemed to deprecate words, to enjoin silence.
A form, ere long, followed the hand. Monsieur emerged from his eclipse;
and producing himself on the front of his estrade, and gazing straight
and fixedly before him at a vast “mappe-monde” covering the wall
opposite, he demanded a third time, and now in really tragic tones—
“Est-ce là tout?”
I might yet have made all right, by stepping forwards and slipping into
his hand the ruddy little shell-box I at that moment held tight in my
own. It was what I had fully purposed to do; but, first, the comic side
of Monsieur’s behaviour had tempted me to delay, and now, Mademoiselle
St. Pierre’s affected interference provoked contumacity. The reader not
having hitherto had any cause to ascribe to Miss Snowe’s character the
most distant pretensions to perfection, will be scarcely surprised to
learn that she felt too perverse to defend herself from any imputation
the Parisienne might choose to insinuate and besides, M. Paul was so
tragic, and took my defection so seriously, he deserved to be vexed. I
kept, then, both my box and my countenance, and sat insensate as any
stone.
“It is well!” dropped at length from the lips of M. Paul; and having
uttered this phrase, the shadow of some great paroxysm—the swell of
wrath, scorn, resolve—passed over his brow, rippled his lips, and lined
his cheeks. Gulping down all further comment, he launched into his
customary “discours.”
I can’t at all remember what this “discours” was; I did not listen to
it: the gulping-down process, the abrupt dismissal of his mortification
or vexation, had given me a sensation which half-counteracted the
ludicrous effect of the reiterated “Est-ce là tout?”
Towards the close of the speech there came a pleasing diversion my
attention was again amusingly arrested.
Owing to some little accidental movement—I think I dropped my thimble
on the floor, and in stooping to regain it, hit the crown of my head
against the sharp corner of my desk; which casualties (exasperating to
me, by rights, if to anybody) naturally made a slight bustle—M. Paul
became irritated, and dismissing his forced equanimity, and casting to
the winds that dignity and self-control with which he never cared long
to encumber himself, he broke forth into the strain best calculated to
give him ease.
I don’t know how, in the progress of his “discours”, he had contrived
to cross the Channel and land on British ground; but there I found him
when I began to listen.
Casting a quick, cynical glance round the room—a glance which scathed,
or was intended to scathe, as it crossed me—he fell with fury upon “les
Anglaises.”
Never have I heard English women handled as M. Paul that morning
handled them: he spared nothing—neither their minds, morals, manners,
nor personal appearance. I specially remember his abuse of their tall
stature, their long necks, their thin arms, their slovenly dress, their
pedantic education, their impious scepticism(!), their insufferable
pride, their pretentious virtue: over which he ground his teeth
malignantly, and looked as if, had he dared, he would have said
singular things. Oh! he was spiteful, acrid, savage; and, as a natural
consequence, detestably ugly.
“Little wicked venomous man!” thought I; “am I going to harass myself
with fears of displeasing you, or hurting your feelings? No, indeed;
you shall be indifferent to me, as the shabbiest bouquet in your
pyramid.”
I grieve to say I could not quite carry out this resolution. For some