XIX
I BEGIN MY LITERARY WORK
I DO not know whether it was from my aunt Sophie’s influence, or my contact with nature, living amid it, or whether it was the slow, clever training of my mind by my father, that made my brain swarm with poetical, mythological, and classical images. I dreamed in turn of Homer and of Virgil, whom I called his great-nephew, in order to give him the same degree of relationship to Homer as that which I possessed towards aunt Sophie.
In September and October of that year, after I had returned to Chauny, I thought I had become a poet. I wrote rhymes about everything I saw: the sun, the moon, the heavens, birds, flowers, fruit, and even about the vegetables in my large garden at Chauny, in which I lived all day during the last months of my vacation.
I confided with trembling my first “poem” to grandmother, and she criticised it with deep emotion. I criticised it myself later with extreme humiliation and contrition. I was already a well-instructed girl, and I might have done far better, but my grandparents found this poetry so beautiful that they read and re-read it to all comers, and grandfather took it with him to his club.
The idea of writing some day most certainly came to me at this time, for I did not cease to cover paper with verses and prose from that day.
I said to myself what was a curious thing for a girl of my age to think: that one must feel deep emotion in order to write and to move others, and I sought all manner of pretexts to arouse my emotions.
There was at the end of our large garden, at the foot of a very high wall, a plot of currant-bushes, too much in the shade to yield much fruit; so they were allowed to grow at will, mixed with raspberry bushes and brambles.
I had a circular place made for me in this underwood. I carried some garden chairs and a table to it, and I called this corner “my temple of verdure.” No one but myself was allowed to enjoy it. I lived there, during my vacations, from breakfast to dinner-time, dreaming, when the weather permitted, and, above all, telling myself stories in which I took extreme delight.
I put so much emotion into my voice that it made my heart ache. I would often cry bitterly over the unhappiness, the sufferings, the vicissitudes of the misery I invented.
I can hear myself even to-day, and see myself sitting amongst my brambles, with the shadow of the high wall falling upon me, and beginning my story in this wise:
“There was once upon a time a poor little boy,”—or little girl, or a poor animal, chosen from among those I loved the best, whom I made most unhappy on account of this or that, and my sorrow for them always increased, for I had no pity, either for my own feelings or for those of my heroes. Their sufferings became so poignant that I sobbed. How many victims I invented! The distant noise of the garden gate, announcing Arthémise coming to call me to dinner, alone decided me to make my victims happy, especially if they had been obliged to suffer privations. I could not have gone to the table and carried with me the anguish of letting them die of hunger!
After some days of this sorrowful exercise, I selected the story which seemed to me the most touching and dramatic; I put it into rhyme or wrote it in prose on a large sheet of paper in my best handwriting to read to grandmother.
On Sundays, as soon as vespers were over, I shut myself up in my room and composed a review of the week’s events. This composition was a bargain between my grandparents and myself. They gave me a cake made of puff-paste called frangipane, which I loved, and which grandfather went to get himself at the confectioner’s at dinner-time, so as to have it hot, and cooked to the right degree. I regaled my dear “ancestors”—this was the new name I bestowed upon them—with my writings, and they regaled me with frangipane, cut into three parts.
Ah! if I had never had other hearers and readers save my grandparents, how much criticism would have been spared me, and how much enthusiastic success I would have had! No public, no admirers were ever so convinced as they that they were listening to chefs d’œuvres.
My friend Charles, the professor, often invited to our table on Sundays, was obliged to proffer his share of praise. He did so most willingly, for his affection for me blinded him. How many times did I hear him say:
“There is something of worth in what that child writes; she will make her mark.”
My grandmother drank in my praise as if it were the nectar of the gods.
Was my friend Charles half sincere? I believed so, but another person, a newcomer, who soon took possession of all our hearts, was surely and entirely so.
His name was Monsieur Blondeau. He was a State Recorder, and had taken an apartment on the ground floor of our house, on the opposite side of the hall from us, which looked out on our blossoming courtyard and the street at once. His apartment comprised an office, a drawing-room, bedroom, and kitchen, and on the first story a room for his old servant, who served him as maid-of-all-work.
Blondeau—I never called him Monsieur from the first week after his arrival—was an old bachelor, very ugly, his face all seamed and scarred, because when he was a child this same old servant had let him fall out of a high window on a heap of stones; but his kindness, his constant desire to devote himself to others and to be useful to them, to love them, and to make himself beloved, made him adorable.
I soon gave him the title of friend, and, as he was tired of table d’hôte life, and, as his old servant, whom he had brought with him from Lons-le-Saulnier, was capable only of cooking his breakfast passably well, I obtained grandmother’s permission to have him dine with us every evening, knowing it was his dream and ambition. He was another one fanatically devoted to me—rather let me say, one of my slaves.
Although he had much work to do, having no clerk, I enlisted him to aid me in doing my arithmetic exercises and in copying out my week’s compositions. He read admirably, far better than grandmother, and he became my habitual reader.
It would not have been strange had I been persuaded by all these flattering opinions that my talents, which Blondeau said “grew as fast as grass,” surpassed those of all known prodigies.
Even my father, who was a lettered man, and whose good taste should have enlightened him concerning his daughter’s lucubrations, considered my writings marvellous.
But my mother, with her usual lack of indulgence, rendered me the service of sobering me regarding all this praise. She put things in their proper place, even exaggerating them in a contrary sense. She declared that what I wrote was inept, and that they would make me a mediocre person by fostering in me a phenomenal pride.
I alone was not vexed with her. She helped me to criticise myself, although sometimes I thought her criticisms as excessive as the admiration of my flatterers was exaggerated.
Having a sufficient company at home on Sundays, my friend Charles included, I determined to put my weekly reviews into dialogues. Each one of us read his personal pages in turn, or we replied to one another.
When I think of all I made my grandparents and Blondeau read and say, I am abashed. Moreover, everyone kept the name I had given him, and the character of the rôle assigned to him, throughout the evening. They allowed themselves to be questioned by me, and answered “attentively,” as my friend Charles said. Had they at least been amused with this child’s play, it would have been tolerable, but on the contrary, they were obliged to rediscuss the weekly discussions, the wherefores of the most subtle questions I had laid before myself, which must often have been rare nonsense and silliness.
My heart is full of gratitude and tenderness for my four sufferers, and, as these recollections bring them before me, perhaps I love them to-day even more than I did at that time.