Chapter 3 : The End of Childhood

Chapter 3. The End of Childhood

As the seed contains the full-grown tree, all life from its very beginning contains whatever it will be—whatever, despite everything, it must become. Thus, I am trying to go back to the sources of the events in my life. One piece of verse I found in my old papers sketched out the pattern my life would take.

The Voyage

At the rim of the desert how immense is the sky.

On your new unknown path, child, where do you go?

What do you hope for, now hid in deep mystery?

—If only I knew. Toward beauty and goodness!

Child, what’s your choice? Peace, calm, and surrender?

You could live like a bird and build up your nest.

Hear, while there’s time; shun the hard brutal path,

Where your fate will be damned, and your life will be tears.

I don’t want to cry, or look backwards too much.

If it weren’t for my mother, I would go far indeed

Through chance-controlled life, where the tempest is blowing,

Go, as one follows the faraway horn.

From deepest concealment, I hear a loud fanfare.

Others have gone there whom I would meet.

Heavy steps on the land! I hear them! I hear them!

It’s humanity marching. With them I would go.

I look at the sand and the heaped-up grain.

In profoundly blue skies I see endless cloud-worlds.

Does it make any difference? One world’s like another.

Where those clouds disappear, it is there I must go.

Those years, the years of the Tomb, when all those so dear to me surrounded my being, those years of my grandfather, of my Aunt Victoire, of Nanette and Josephine, of M. Michel and the schoolroom of Vroncourt—those years live for me still, though the Tomb is now a ruin and those who people these pages died long ago.

Deep down in the wellsprings of my life are the tales of old legends. Today, I see those phantoms still: Corsican sorceresses, mermaids with green eyes, medieval bandits, Jacques Bonhommes, red-haired Teutons, tall, blue-eyed Gallic peasants. From Corsican bandit in his wild gorges to judge of the High Court of Brittany, all of them are in love with the unknown. All of them bequeath to their descendants, bastard or legiti¬ mate, the heritage of the bards.

My love lies in these atavistic legends. People are always taunting me for never speaking of love. I have to go back to those hours when young women are just learning to dream. From the pages of old books read in the dawn of life many songs of love escape, and within those pages a young woman can be in love with love as much as she wishes. I mean she can look for an ideal person she could love if she were to meet him in real life. Among the sons of Gaul, among the barbarians, she chooses the bravest of the brave. She can look into the far past at men of the north, the men of the Ghilde who fought for freedom and who used to pour three cups of wine on the flagstones—one for the dead, another for their ancestors, and a third for the brave. The Bagaudes, who died in their flaming tower; the poets; the troubadors; the great leaders of robber bands who stole from the rich bandit in the manor to give to the miserable beggar in his thatched cottage—they are my loves.

I couldn’t be faithful to only one of those loves; there were too many of them. From the devil to Mandrin, from Faust to Saint-Just, how many phantoms made me dream when I was a child! I dreamed of the Jacqueries and the peoples’ rebellions of the Middle Ages.

Many things float in children’s dreams. Some are red like blood and some black like a night of mourning. Such were the banners of the rebels who dwelt deep in my thoughts. The weddings of those who loved each other were the red weddings of martyrs, and they signed their covenants in blood.

I wasn’t the only young girl who loved stories of rebels. Often the other girls of the village and I talked of the things which the old songs or legends of the country spoke of. I remember part of one song:

He whom she loved,

Proud he was,

Helmet on head.

Hear the lark That sings for him.

White she was;

Hands gathering Mistletoe

From the dark oak,

And verbena Deep in the woods.

I created poems from these old legends. Even if there hadn’t been a little atavism in my blood helping me to write poetry, no one could have escaped being a poet in this country of Champagne and Lorraine, where the very winds sang Germanic war chants and songs of love and rebellion. Through the great snows of winter, past the sunken paths full of hawthorn in the spring, pushing through the deep black woods of enormous oaks and poplars with trunks like columns, you can still follow the paved roads of the conquering Romans, and in many places see where the unconquered, long-haired Gauls ripped up those paving stones.

Everyone is a bit of a poet. Nanette and Josephine, those daughters of the fields, were poets naturally. After many years and across many seas in New Caledonia, one of their songs, “The Black Bird of the Fallow Field,” came back to my mind during a cyclone. In my version of it you can hear the same black chord which vibrates in the heart of nature, but their version in dialect is sweeter and more mysterious. In theirs you can smell the wild rosebush of the hedges, and at the same moment hear the bird of the fallow field, who lets his melancholy notes trickle down like someone telling his beads, and a deeper note like a tide grinding against a reef.

In the patois of the Haute-Marne their song goes like this:

1 .

In the fallow field A pretty bird sang.

Black, black it was,

And it sobbed strongly.

What was it saying,

The bird of the fallow field?

2 .

Through its echoes From under the trees,

The north wind was crying,

Sobbing with the bird,

What the black bird was saying,

The bird of the fallow field.

How many memories I have. Is it irrelevant to put down all this foolishness? Yesterday, I had trouble getting used to writing about myself; today, searching the days that have disappeared, I can’t stop. I see everything again.

I can see the round stones at the far end of the yard near the knoll and the thicket of hazel trees close by. There, thousands of young toads peacefully underwent their metamorphosis, if we didn’t kidnap them and throw them against the legs of nasty people. Poor toads!

In the courtyard, behind the well, we children put bunches of twigs, bundles that let us erect a scaffold with steps, a platform, two tall wooden poles, everything. Then we depicted historical epochs and characters we liked. We put the Terror of 1793 into dramatic form, and we climbed one after the other up the steps of the scaffold, where we made ready for our executions, crying out “Long live the Republic!” The public was represented by my cousin Mathilde, and sometimes by chickens and roosters gobbling and pecking and spreading their tails wide. We searched history books for human cruelties. Our scaffold became the stake of John Hus, or still further back in the past, the burning of the rebel Bagaudes in their tower in the year 280.

One day, as we were climbing our scaffold singing, my grandfather suggested to us that it would be better to climb the steps to the platform in silence, and at the top to affirm the principle for which we were dying. Afterwards, we modified our dramas to follow his advice.

Our play wasn’t always so serious. Sometimes we had mock hunts. Pigs served as boars, and we lit brooms to serve as torches. We ran with the dogs to the dreadful noise of shepherds’ horns, which we called the trumpets of the hunt. An old gamekeeper had taught us how to sound something he called the “hallali.”

We observed all the rules of the art of venery in these disheveled chases with our running dogs. They ended with our taking the pigs home, whether they liked it or not, and several times the pigs fell in the kitchen garden waterhole, where their fat supported them while they made desperate “oufs” until someone pulled them out. Pulling them out wasn’t easy. Men with ropes took charge of the operation, yelling at us. They looked at me as if I were a runaway horse.

I have never met children who were, at the same time, as wild and as serious, as naughty and as fearful of causing hurt, as lazy and as industrious as my cousin Jules and me. Each year during vacation he came to the Tomb with his mother, Agathe, whom I loved dearly and who spoiled me very much.

The diversity of the questions that Jules and I discussed astonishes me now. Sometimes we would stop to argue in the middle of a performance of a drama by Victor Hugo, which we had arranged for two actors. “They don’t respect anything,” people said. At other times we would argue from the branches of apple trees, where we had chased our cats. Why did we chat from one tree to another? I really don’t know. It was pleasant up in the branches, and, too, we used to throw each other all the apples we could reach, which gave Marie Verdet lots of good, fallen fruit to pick up. Marie Verdet was the old, old woman who told me the story of the Three Washerwomen; she always saw those things, and Jules and I never did.

That we never saw the things she saw didn’t keep us from enjoying her stories. Indeed, I enjoyed them so much that I fell in love with all that was fantastic. Among haunted ruins I drew magical circles, and I declared my love to Satan. Satan didn’t come, which led me to think he didn’t exist.

One day, chatting from tree to tree with Jules, I told him of my declaration of love to Satan and his failure to answer me. Jules confessed to me that he had sent a declaration of love no less tender to the famous woman of letters, George Sand, and she hadn’t answered any more than the devil had.

After a performance of Hugo’s Burgraves or Hernani which we had arranged for two actors, I gave Jules a lute, made like mine. In one stormy discussion on the merits of the sexes, Jules maintained that if I learned from the schoolbooks he had brought with him during the vacation, and learned so that I was more or less on his level, it was only because I was an anomaly. Our lutes served as projectiles, and broke our discussion.

While still a child, I started writing a Universal History for inclusion in the rows of redbound manuscript books my grandfather kept. I started writing it because Bossuet’s History bored me and because Jules, one vacation, brought me the history he used in school. I documented the main facts as well as I could, and went about my studying as if I were a male.

A long time ago I recognized the superiority of the course of study in boys’ preparatory schools to the education of girls in the provinces. Some years after I studied my cousin’s textbook, I had the opportunity to verify the difference in emphasis given the same subject between the two courses of study—one for “the ladies” and the other for the “strong sex”—and to examine the result of that difference.

I’m convinced that my first impressions were correct; adults give girls a pile of nonsense supported by childlike logic, while at the same time they make “our lords and masters” swallow little balls of science until they choke. For both of us, it is a ridiculous education. A few hundred years from now people will see it all as a heap of trash—even the education of men.

The Universal History I started to write must have contained some extraordinary mistakes. I consulted enough infallible books to assure their presence. But after I had worked on it for a long time, someone gave me several volumes of Voltaire, and I left my historical masterpiece for a poem.

Then I deserted my poem for a mammoth’s tooth, of which even Big Laumont spoke with enthusiasm. At the top of the north tower I set up a small cell full of everything that looked like geological findings. I added modern skeletons of dogs and cats, skulls of horses, crucibles, a stove, and a tripod. The devil, if he exists, knows everything I tried there: alchemy, astrology, the summoning of spirits. Every legend, from the alchemist Nicholas Flamel to Faust, had a home in my tower.

Also in my tower I had a lute, a horrible instrument I made myself out of a fir board and old guitar strings. I wrote verses that I addressed to Victor Hugo, and in them I spoke pompously of my barbaric instrument. He never knew what this poet’s lute really looked like, this lyre with which I sent him the sweetest greetings.

In my tower I also had a magnificent barn owl with phosphorescent eyes, whom I called Olympe, and I had some darling bats who drank milk like little cats. I stripped the grills out of the big winnowing basket to make cages for them, because it was safer for them to be confined during the day.

When I was twelve or thirteen I had two grown-up suitors. The memory of those two ridiculous persons who followed each other like geese and who asked my grandparents for my hand would have driven me away from marriage even if I hadn’t already decided it was repulsive. The first one, a true comic character, wished to “share his fortune”—he made each word ring like a little bell—with a wife reared according to his principles, that is to say, like Moliere’s Agnes.

After all that I had read, it was too late to rear me this way. That animal! He must have slept for a century or two, and when he woke up he came to my grandparents to recite this nonsense.

My grandparents let me make up my own mind and answer for myself. The very day that fool appeared my grandfather and I had just been reading from an old edition of Moli£re. The suitor looked to me so much like Agnes’s guardian in Ecole des femmes that I found a way to slip into my answer a great part of the scene beginning, “The little cat is dead,” when her guardian questions her about an unknown male visitor. I gave him Agnes’s speech as an answer, word for word, and naturally he didn’t understand. Then, driven to despair, I looked straight in his face, and with the ingenuousness of Agnes, I said to him boldly, knowing he had one glass eye, “Monsieur, is your other eye glass, too?” That seemed to embarrass my relatives a little, and as for my suitor, he gave me a venomous look from the eye that wasn’t glass, and made it clear he no longer wanted to make me his fiancee.

At this time, I had been growing a lot, and my dress was very short. My pinafore was torn, and in my pocket I had my net for catching toads. I was only sorry that I hadn’t already caught a few so that I could slip them into his pocket, but I didn’t need to. He never returned.

Moliere inspired me just as much when I dealt with the second of my two suitors. I don’t think they knew each other, and yet they made a good pair. So many persons seem to go in pairs or threesomes, like stars that orbit around each other. They both had the idea of choosing a very young fiancee and having her molded like soft wax for a few years before offering her up to themselves as a sacrifice.

To my second suitor, I said, more or less: “You see plainly what’s hanging on the wall over there.” It was a pair of stag antlers. “Well, I don’t love you. I will never love you, and if I marry you I won’t restrain myself any more than Mme Dandin did. If I marry you, you will wear horns on your head a hundred thousand feet higher than those antlers.”

I suppose I convinced him I was telling him the truth, for he never came back. My relatives advised me, however, to be a little more reserved in quoting old authors in the future.

There have been unfortunate children who were forced to marry old crocodiles like those. If it had been done to me, either he or I would have had to jump out the window.

Not too long after that affair, my grandfather was returning from Bourmont on the stagecoach. Seated next to him was a third maniac who pointed out Vroncourt and the Tomb and said to him:

“You see that old rats’ nest.”

“Yes,” grandfather replied.

“An old fellow lives there who is raising his grandchildren for prison and the scaffold.”

“Oh, really?” said grandfather.

“Yes, monsieur. My friend X-recently proposed marrying one of

them, a little smart-aleck, in a few years, if her education were directed as he wished.”

“Well?”

“The old fellow let her give her own answer. Whatever she wished. She said such horrible things that my friend doesn’t even want to repeat them. If I had a daughter like that, I’d put her in a reform school. And her a little wench who doesn’t have a sou to her name. Hey, where are you going?”

“I’m getting off at Vroncourt,” grandfather said. “I’m the old fellow you’ve been discussing.”

So these were the days of my childhood. Now they are sketched out, laid out on the table, the cadaver of my life. These days of former times were so calm in events and so full of tormented dreams. Even then I sensed my destiny. People do sense their destinies, as dogs sense a wolf, and sometimes it comes true with a strange precision. If everybody told of their prescient thoughts in minute detail, it would be like reading the Tales of Edgar Allan Pe.

I must write things as they come to me. They are like pictures passing from sight and going away endlessly into the shadows. Of my old relatives, of my young and old friends, of my mother, nothing remains today but the dreams of my childhood. I see those who disappeared yesterday or a long time ago, just as they were, and I see all that surrounded their lives, and the wound of their absence bleeds just as much now as it did in the first few days. I have no real homesickness for a country, but I am homesick for the dead. And the further along I get in these memoirs, the more numerous are the images that press close to me of those whom I shall never see again.

At the Tomb, near the hazel tree in a bastion of the wall, was a bench where my mother and grandmother used to come during the summer after the heat of the day. My mother, to make Grandmother happy, had filled this corner of the garden with all kinds of rosebushes. While the two women talked I leaned on the wall. The garden was cool in the dew of the evening. The perfumes of all the flowers mingled and climbed up to the sky. The honeysuckle, the reseda, the roses, all exhaled sweet perfumes which joined each other. Bats flew gently in the twilight, and their shadows soothed my thoughts. I used to recite the ballads that I loved, without ever thinking that death was going to pass over us.

When these days of my dawning ended, so ended my songs that were sad and dreamy. Death swooped down on the Tomb. The foyer was empty and those old people who had reared me were laid to rest under the pines in the cemetery.

I inherited a small tract of land. I can only picture one piece of it now, a small copse my mother planted on the hill near her little vineyard.

From the hill I could see the woods of Suzerin and the red roof of the farm, the blue mountains of Bourmont, Vroncourt, the mill, and the entire hill of wheat waving in the wind. In my mind I imagined that the sea would look like that waving wheat, and I found out later I was right. My mother took care of the copse during her long stay in the Haute- Marne while I was an assistant schoolmistress in Paris.

There was so little time for living together. “Things have tears,” Virgil wrote. I feel them when I think of the little woods and the vineyard watered by Mother’s sweat. Years later, her own mother Marguerite wanted to see the vineyard one last time before she died, and my uncle carried here there in his arms.

During the Franco-Prussian War, Prussian soldiers went through like victors. They cut down the woods and destroyed the vineyard. There was a little hut in the middle, and I believe they burned it down while making a fire to warm themselves out of the trees they cut down. When I was sent to New Caledonia, people claimed payment for various debts I had incurred during the Siege of Paris, and my mother had to sell the land.

When my paternal grandparents died, I had to leave my calm retreat in the Tomb. From this time until her own mother died, my mother lived in Vroncourt near the cemetery. From there she could hear the wind in the pines that shadowed the family’s cherished graves. I can still see the tops of the pines, heavy with snow during the winter. Never have I seen winters so long as in the Haute-Marne, and never have I felt such cold, except in polar oceans.

Before I left the Tomb, I wrote a farewell verse and carved it in the wall of the tower. The old ruins did not take good care of my farewell very long, for not a stone of it remains today.

Farewell, my dreaming retreat in the manor.

Goodbye, my high and windy tower.

Only your old moss remains,

And I, a frail, storm-broken branch,

Shall follow the currents on.

Your swallows will circle without me

And sing summer days on the rooftop,

While I drift on, an outcast.

Won’t your turret be missing its mistress

When my voice is no longer its echo?