XI
A PAINFUL RETURN HOME
THE three weeks passed so quickly that I had written very seldom to my grandmother, not daring to speak to her about the conversations with my father, or of the impression they had made upon me. I said to myself it would be better to make my confession slowly. In like manner, as my father had enlightened me with regard to his ideas, I would enlighten my grandmother concerning mine. Moreover, I had not been converted. Saint-Just’s ferocity was absolved, for reasons I could not quite remember; my father, so good, so benevolent, was capable of becoming cruel after “provocation”—I remembered that word—all this aroused a great revolt in me, and overthrew my first enthusiasm.
There had been several “family dramas” on my account. I occupied too large a place in my father’s life, and my mother could not overcome that unfortunate jealousy which caused us all so much sorrow.
My father loved her passionately for her beauty, which should have given her every right to believe herself loved; I looked at her with admiration, and bestowed upon her a sort of worship; and my grandparents were very proud of her. But she had spoiled our mutual affection by her coldness, and destroyed our confidence in her love for us, because she constantly doubted our love; none of our assurances would convince her, whereas a careless word, spoken by chance, without any real intention of wounding her, became to her a proof of all she imagined, and then she became so unjust it made one believe she was hard-hearted. Whereas, in truth, her undeserved, cutting reproaches, her insinuations, her accusations, were only a sort of despair at not being able to force us to love her as she wished to be loved, and at not having won a larger amount of our affection precisely on account of that conduct which made us love her less.
My father wished to take me back to my grandmother himself. She opposed his wish, and it was she who accompanied me home. The pain she caused me during that short journey recalled to me my first day at school.
We were both mounted on the same donkey, and had not gone very far on our route when, the animal becoming fatigued, my mother got down. She talked as she walked along, while I, very proud, held the reins and did not wish to think of anything else.
My mother questioned me in a wearisome and annoying manner about my grandmother’s love for me. She made me impatient, and, not being accustomed to control myself, I answered two or three times:
“Mamma, I beg of you, leave me alone; you torment me more than the priest at confession.”
“Has your grandmother ever told you she would find a husband for you and give you a great deal of money—a dot?” she asked me suddenly after a silence.
Having got up early, with my head drowsy, and having been tormented for half an hour, I answered unfortunately:
“Yes, grandmother will give me as large a dot as she can. Are you satisfied?”
My mother struck the donkey, which was also half asleep. I was jolted so unexpectedly that I fell off on the opposite side from my mother on a heap of stones.
The shock stunned me. I was blinded by blood. I called “Mamma!” and found she was no longer by me. I got up, took my handkerchief and tried to collect the blood on my forehead; my flowing tears enabled me to open my eyes. I looked for her, but a turn in the road prevented me from seeing how far away she might be. She had disappeared in order to punish me. I thought she had abandoned me, alone and bleeding.
I started to run as fast as I could. My mother was waiting for me. The sight of the blood which covered my face, and which came from a wound under my hair near my temple, and which grandfather said in the evening might have killed me, did not touch her heart. She raised me from the ground by my belt without getting off the donkey, which she had remounted, placed me on her lap without saying a word, holding me tightly with her left arm while she drove the donkey with her right hand, tapping its head with the reins.
I was very uncomfortably seated, and suffered much from my position, but I did not complain. I thought only of getting home, of seeing my grandmother, whom I would never leave again.
I did not cease sobbing, and the people who met us could not understand my evident despair nor my mother’s impassibility.
My grandmother, informed of my coming, was at the window with Arthémise. They ran to the door on seeing us. When my grandmother saw the state I was in, she took me into the drawing-room, overcome with grief. She could not kiss me, there was so much clotted blood on my face.
She had begun to question me, anxiously, when my mother, who had taken the donkey to the stable followed by Arthémise, came like a bomb into the drawing-room, and began again the eternal “family drama” so angrily that the quarrel became more and more passionate. Finally I, crying in despair, was taken with a nose-bleeding, which my handkerchief, already saturated with blood, could not stanch, and I was literally covered with blood.
I could understand nothing of my mother’s and grandmother’s explanations, they were so mixed up, and, besides, my head was aching so badly.
I had certainly done wrong to say what I had said, and I felt myself miserably guilty, but because of the thoughtless words of a child, did I deserve to be left in such a state?
“So,” said my mother, “you have promised to give Juliette as large a dot as you can, and, doubtless, your fortune also? Am I, then, absolutely nothing to you? Do you disown me, your own daughter? I don’t care a fig for your money, but the humiliation of being treated thus by you is something I will not bear.”
When I think of my distress during those not-to-be-forgotten minutes, I still feel the effect of it, so convulsed was I in all my being, and so keenly did I realise my mother’s cruel jealousy.
My grandfather appeared at one door, Arthémise at the other. He looked at me, listened for a moment, and understood what was taking place. I threw myself in his arms, crying, my face bloated, swollen, and bleeding, in such a misery of abandonment and feeling so forsaken that my grandfather’s heart was convulsed with pain.
“You are, each of you, madder, more wicked, more ferocious than the other,” he cried, in a furious voice. “Your quarrels, your suspicions, your idiotic, imbecile explanations crush every atom of maternal feeling in your hearts. You will kill the child, do you hear? you will kill her! Olympe, do you not remember that your son died of convulsions after one of your quarrels? Look, both of you, at your only child. Don’t you feel any pity for her, shrews that you are? And then you will dare say to me that you love Juliette! I have half a mind to take her from you both, and to fly with her to the ends of the world. Just look at her!”
And grandfather, who was fond of dramatic scenes himself, placed me standing on a chair. My sobs redoubled, and I must have been pitiful to see, for my mother and grandmother threw themselves upon me, frightened. Grandfather pushed them aside, and put me in Arthémise’s arms, who again began her song: “It is murder!”
This phrase made me remember, with singular clearness, my adventure at school, and I cried out to grandmother:
“This time I will never forgive you!” My lips trembled, my throat was on fire, and I was shivering.
While grandfather washed me, grandmother made up the fire, weeping. When I was warmed and calmed, my grandfather, with an anger and hardness I had never seen him show before, flew at my mother, seized her by the wrists, and, shaking her, said:
“It is not enough that her father and grandmother should over-excite this child’s brain enough to make it burst, but you must go and give her such a cerebral commotion that it is enough to make her crazy.”
And as my mother, in excusing herself, began again to accuse me——
“Hold your tongue, and take care!” cried grandfather, in a threatening voice. “I thought until to-day that you resembled my poor mother, too passive and too ‘browsing.’ Don’t recall my father to me by your ferocious hard-heartedness! If you go on like this, I will make you kneel and ask your daughter’s pardon.”
“You are breaking my wrists,” she said, “let go of me. I have the right——”
I thought then that grandfather was going to beat her. His voice became so terrible that I saw my grandmother tremble.
“Do you repent of the wrong you have done to your daughter?”
“Yes!” she said, falling on a chair, overcome by her father, whom alone she feared, and who was never violent, never showed firmness except to her.
Poor mother! she suffered, herself, to such a degree from her morbid passion of jealousy that, when she was stricken with paralysis and confided her mental tortures to us, we heartily forgave her for those fits of anger.