Chapter 5. Schoolmistress in the Haute-Marne

When my grandparents died and I had to leave the Tomb, I began to prepare for my examinations as a schoolmistress because I wanted to make my mother happy. There was little money, but the arrangements for my legal protection were complex. My mother served as one guardian and M. Voisin, a former magistrate, was another, just as if they were administering a fortune. The attorney, Maitre Girault, notary at Bourmont, served as surrogate of the court. People said that all this wasn’t enough to keep me from immediately wasting the eight or ten thousand francs in land that I had inherited.

For the moment, however, I devoted myself to my education. Except for three months at Lagny in 1851, my whole higher education came from the teacher-training course under Mmes Beths and Royer at Chaumont.

I see Chaumont now as it was then. I see the Boulingrin, the street of Choignes with its sinister memories, for that was where the executioner lived. I see the viaduct crossing the whole valley of the Ecoliers. Most of all, I see Sucot’s bookstore, where first as a student and then as a schoolmistress I always had debts. I see the large curly head of M. Sucot looking out of the window in which he displayed his fanciest stationery, newest books, and latest musical scores from Paris. As a child I had been dazzled when I looked at the bookstore in Bourmont, and certain displays of books still affect me.

I see Chaumont, and the old boarding house where I lodged, and my teachers, and my friends, with whom I played practical jokes on nasty people. With Clara, one of my friends, I remember causing a great commotion at the homes of people who were bullying republicans. On the doors of their houses, we made a mark—a mysterious mark, they said—with red chalk. Some people saw the mark as an egalitarian triangle (a little elongated); others saw an unknown instrument of torture; those who were disinterested in the affair saw a big donkey’s ear. The last were right.

The three months at Lagny came when my mother and I visited relatives in the area. We stayed with my uncle, who was disturbed by my constant writing, for he feared I would desert the teacher’s examination to write poetry. To forestall this, he put me in Mme Duval’s private boarding school at Lagny, where his own daughter had been educated, and I stayed there about three months.

At Mme Duval’s, as at my school in Chaumont, everybody lived for books. The outside world stopped at the threshold, and I concentrated all my enthusiasm on the crumbs and bits of science I was reading about.

The lack of time! You learn just enough to make you thirsty for the rest, and there is never time for the rest. Before 1871 that was the torture of every schoolmistress’s life. Before getting her diploma she was faced with a program of study that kept growing boundlessly, and after getting her diploma she saw that she knew nothing. To be sure, that predicament was nothing new, and it was shared. All of us schoolmistresses were in the same position. The living springs where you could quench your thirst for knowledge were not for those who had to fight for existence.

At my boarding house at Chaumont I met my friend Julie. Sometimes the destinies of different persons intertwine for a time and then take opposite courses. Julie and I were both schoolmistresses, first in the Haute-Marne and then in Paris, where we stayed together while we were assistant schoolmistresses at Mme Vollier’s.

In Paris Julie kept busy at her studies, and the hatred I felt for Napoleon’s Empire left her cold. It was music and poetry that swept her away. Then the great events of 1870-71 came and Julie remained a stranger to them. Our paths diverged completely. But before those events, during our vacation, we had gone into the deep woods, and under the oak tree traditional for such oaths we had sworn eternal friendship for each other. Neither of us really broke that oath. Events pulled us apart.

When I took my diploma at the end of 1852, I would have liked to have taught in Paris and worked as a schoolmistress while I continued my studies. Many people did just that. But at the time I did not want to be separated from my mother, and I taught in the Haute-Marne so I could live near her and my grandmother Marguerite. That is why I began my career, in January 1853, as a schoolmistress at Audeloncourt.

The road from Chaumont to Audeloncourt is long. It turns and spirals around Mont Chauve, comes down the slopes by the easiest descents possible, and then shoots forward, straightening out its bends through villages whose houses still have thatched roofs. Then the road comes to the Sueur Woods, where, under the low branches of twisted apple trees, sits the collapsed ruin of a little inn. The old people of the area claim that the throats of travelers used to be slit in that inn. Only a little over a century ago those who entered that inn rarely left it.

Travelers got on and off the coach that stopped at each relay station from Chaumont to Audeloncourt. Some were dressed in ordinary blue work shirts with cherrywood snuff boxes in their pockets, and they carried sticks hanging from their wrists by little leather straps. Others were dressed in their very best, clothes worn so rarely that folds from the cupboards where they had been packed were traced on them as if a pressing iron had done it.

Part of my maternal family lived in Audeloncourt. My maternal great-uncles—Simon, Michel, and Francis, who was called Uncle Franc- fort—lived there. They were tall, handsome old men, with strong shoulders, powerful judgments, and simple hearts. They all had red hair with no silver threads in it, even as old as they were when I began teaching. They had quick minds and, like my mother’s brothers, they had somehow learned a great mass of information and spoke well.

Many years ago some ancestor had bought an entire library by the kilogram. There were old texts illustrated with Homer calling down the clouds on his characters; old chronicles from which legends flew so strongly that my great-uncles had adopted some of them; volumes of out-of-date science; novels of by-gone days—all published under the king’s censorship. I heard all of those books spoken of so enthusiastically that I deeply regretted the pages that were missing from some books, and the other books that had been lost completely.

The women of Audeloncourt used to read my great-uncles’ novels in their late-night ecregnes. The reader of the evening would lick her thumb to turn the pages while her gentle eyes dropped tears over the misfortunes of the heroes. Some people read aloud so well that they charmed their listeners, and the ecregne lasted until midnight. Then, still trembling from the emotional impact of the story, some of the women would walk the others back to their homes. The snow spread over everything. The hoarfrost, like flowers in May, covered the branches. The last women, the ones who lived farthest away, ran through the snow to their houses while their friends yelled after them to reassure them.

Perhaps my uncles’ library also gave my maternal family the habit of studying alone, for none of them was rich enough to afford any formal education. My mother’s brother, Uncle Georges, had an astounding historical erudition. Uncle Michael had a passion for mechanical things, which I abused when I was a child, making him descend to the construction of a little chariot and a thousand other devices.

I loved my mother’s brothers a great deal, and I imprudently called them Georges and Fanfan until one day when my grandmother told me it was bad to treat one’s elders with so little respect. I had a third uncle who died in Africa many years ago. He had been in military service and either from that experience or from books had gotten a taste for travel. He also had a sound appreciation of many things—above all, discipline, which provided him with many reflections that he didn’t think I was capable of understanding. Anarchy, I believe, germinates in the heart of all discipline.

My school in Audeloncourt, which I opened in January 1853, was classed as a Free School, because for it to become a communal school I would have had to have taken an oath to support the Empire. I was optimistic; I even nourished the illusion of making a happy future for my mother. But a month’s charge for a student could only be one franc, which was a relatively large sum for farm-workers. Because I wasn’t old enough to meet the age requirement for keeping boarders, I was obliged to put my students from other villages into the homes of my Audeloncourt pupils. Still, in spite of accusations some idiots made about that and about my political opinions, my class went very well because I taught with passion. I had the zeal of the very young.

When we were in my classroom at Audeloncourt we could hear the incessant noise of water. During the summer a brook flowed downhill murmuring to the listener. In the winter, the brook became a furious torrent. Who listens to it now? Who listens from the dark school where I was surrounded by attentive students? Students are always attentive in the villages, where no harsh distractions come from outside.

I can still call all my students by name, from Little Rose, whom we called Little Mole because of her lustrous black hair, to Big Rose, who is a schoolmistress herself now. Claire also became a schoolmistress. Eudoxie died in my arms during an epidemic. There was Tall Estelle who looked like a vivacious shepherdess of Floridan, and poor Aricie, thin, lame, weak, who could absorb a whole textbook in a few days. And Z6lie, the sister of the public courier of Clefmont, I loved doubly because of her vivid imagination and because she had the same name as a friend of mine at Vroncourt, whom I mourned for a long time. The public courier and his sister were orphans. He was the eldest of the family, and although he was very young, he filled the place of their dead parents and had wanted his sister to attend my school. In my trips between Audeloncourt and Chaumont, he and I used to talk of all sorts of things, the way people do who read a great deal.

In my class at Audeloncourt, we sang the Marseillaise before the morning’s study began and after study ended in the evening. The stanza especially for children:

We’ll take over this course

When our elders are no longer here

was sung kneeling; one of the youngest, the little brunet Rose, sang it solo. When we picked up the chorus again, the children and I often had tears flooding from our eyes.

I found that same feeling again at Noumea during the last year of my exile in New Caledonia. It was July 14, Bastille Day. At this period I was in charge of teaching drawing and singing in the girls’ schools in the city. M. Simon, who was the interim mayor, wanted the children to stand in the open bandstand in the Place des Cocotiers and sing the Marseillaise between the two customary evening cannon shots. Night had fallen suddenly. In tropical areas like New Caledonia there is neither dusk nor dawn. The palm trees were rustling gently, swayed by the evening breeze. The lanterns lit the bandstand a little, but left the square in shadow. We felt the pressure of the crowd—a black and white crowd. In front of the bandstand was the military band. Mme Penand, the first lay schoolmistress who had come to the colony, was standing near me, as was an artilleryman who was going to sing with us. Arranged in a circle the children surrounded us.

After the first cannon shot such a silence fell that our hearts stopped beating. I felt our voices soaring into this silence, and it seemed as if we were being carried off on wings. The penetrating voices of the children’s choir and the thunder of the brass instruments between the stanzas thrilled us beyond belief. That song had led our fathers; it was the living Marseillaise and we loved it.

Upon my return from New Caledonia, I found the sacred hymn was being used in all sorts of public spectacles. It had not really recovered from the mire through which the last days of the Empire had dragged it, and wounded once again, the Marseillaise was dead for us.

At Audeloncourt on Sundays, small black wooden shoes clicked hurriedly toward the door of the church, in order to get out by the time the priest intoned “Domine, salvum fac Napoleonem.” I had told the children that it was sacrilegious to take part in a prayer for that man. The little black wooden shoes ran hurriedly out of the church, making a gentle, dry noise like hail, the same little dry noise that the bullets made on 22 January 1871, raining down from the windows of the Hotel de Ville upon the unarmed crowd. Later, I heard the sound of wooden shoes again. Those were on the tired feet of the women prisoners at Auberive, and they clumped sadly as the woman shuffled around the prison.

In those years when I was teaching in the Haute-Marne, I often thought of going to Paris. Paris, of which I had only an imperfect notion and of which I had only glimpsed the marvels that people spoke about, attracted me. Only there could people fight the Empire, and Paris called so strongly that a person could feel its magnetism.

The self-proclaimed defenders of law and order around Audeloncourt who deigned to bother about me at all, called me a “red,” meaning a republican, and they accused me of wanting to go to Paris. I still don’t see why my wanting to go there should have upset them. If my opinions bothered them so much, they should have been happy to see me go.

Those denunciations did trouble my mother. They also got me a good trip to Chaumont, the capital of the Haute-Marne. The business there was supposed to occupy me for two days, but it ended as soon as I arrived. I went to the home of the rector of the departmental academy, M. Fayet, and there I sat on his hearth as I used to sit talking to my grandparents at the Tomb. I explained my actions in the light of the accusations made against me. I said people claimed that I wanted to go to Paris and that I was a republican. Both claims, I admitted, were perfectly true. In speaking of my studies, of the passion that called me to Paris, and of the Republic, I opened my heart.

The rector looked at me in silence a long time before answering. His wife, who took my side, smiled, while their pet doves flew around the room, which was full of sunlight and smelled like spring and like morning the entire day. The rector ended the interview by chiding me gently.

I drove back from Chaumont with the public courier, who was the brother of my student Zelie. Never did we have a more serious conversation than we had on that drive. In my pocket I had a piece of red chalk similar to that with which Clara and I had drawn donkeys’ ears on the doors of Bonapartists in Chaumont. On the trip I used it to make the same drawing on the back of a traveler who was trying to praise Bonaparte. I also made him tremble when I said: “The Republic must come. We are many, and we are strong.”

Another time, the accusations against me were of a different nature. From Audeloncourt I sent verses to Victor Hugo. My mother and I had seen him in the summer of 1851. Later, he answered the letters I wrote to him from my exile, as he had sent letters from Paris to my nest in Vroncourt and to my boarding house at Chaumont. I also sent a few articles to the Chaumont newspaper. I still have a few fragments of those articles, which are less fragile than the cherished hands that saved them for me. One of my articles contained a passage that got me accused of insulting His Majesty, the Emperor. That accusation was correct, of course, and could have been made on the basis of other pieces I wrote at the time.

The article was a history of the martyrs and began:

Domitian was ruling. He had banished . . . philosophers and scholars from Rome, increased the salary of the pretorians, reestablished the Capitoline games, and everybody therefore adored the merciful emperor while they waited for others to stab him. . . .

We are in Rome in the year 97 A.D.

The prefect summoned me to his office. There he told me I had insulted His Majesty, the Emperor, by comparing him to Domitian and that if I were not so young he would have the right to send me to the prison colony at Cayenne.

I answered that anyone who saw M. Bonaparte in the portrait I had painted insulted him just as much as I was accused of doing, but that it was indeed M. Bonaparte that I had in mind. I added that, as for Cayenne, I would be perfectly happy to set up an educational establishment there, and since I could not afford to pay for the expense of the trip myself, it would be very nice if the state sent me there. Things went no further.

Some time after this interview a credulous man wanted to ask the prefect for some favor; what, I’m not sure. He came to me saying that since I had been at the prefect’s, I could recommend him there. In vain I tried to tell him I had been called to the prefecture only to be accused and threatened with Cayenne, and that my recommendation would be worth very little. The good man wouldn’t give up, so in the end I wrote him a letter of recommendation that read, more or less:

Monsieur le perfet,

The person to whom you were kind enough to promise a trip to Cayenne is being tormented to give a letter of recommendation to you.

I have not been able to make this man understand that this would be the way to have him kicked out of your office. He is as stubborn as a donkey.

Let him not learn to his sorrow that I was correct in my reluctance to write a letter for him.

I beg you, dear sir, not to forget the trip you spoke to me about.

After he had made his expedition to Chaumont, the man came up to me. I confess I was already laughing at the tale of woe he was going to tell me, when to my great surprise he said: “I knew it. You’re lucky for me. I got what I requested.” He, not I, was lucky.

My dear friend Julie taught nearby at Millteres, and two institutions with no resources were barely able to subsist near each other. The obvious thing was for us to get together, which we did at Milli£res. Julie and I used to sing together in the spring evenings with a piano serving as an organ. At that time she had a voice like the forest nightingales.

But always I dreamed of Paris. Throughout these years in the Haute- Marne, Paris called me ever more strongly, for in Paris I would be at the heart of affairs. In 1855 or 1856 I finally decided that there was no alternative to my going there.