Roumestan was filled with emotion, as he always was over anything concerning himself. He had not visited this spot for perhaps thirty years; it needed the whim of this young girl to bring him here. He was much struck with the immutability of things. He recognized in the wall a shutter-catch that his childish hand had turned and played with every morning as he passed on his way up the street. The columns and precious torsos of the academy threw their shadows on the same spot as of old. The rose-laurel bushes had the same spicy odor and he showed Hortense the narrow window where his mother had sat and signed to him to hurry when he came from the friars’ school:
“Come up quickly, father has come in!” His father did not like to be kept waiting.
“Tell me, Numa, is it really true? were you really educated by the friars?”
“Yes, little sister, until I was twelve years old, and then Aunt Portal sent me to the Assumption, the most fashionable boarding-school in the town; but it was the Ignorantins over there in that big barrack with yellow shutters who taught me to read.”
As he called to mind the pail of brine under the Brother’s chair in which were soaked the straps with which they beat the boys, to make the pain greater, he shuddered; he remembered the large paved class-room where they were made to say their lessons on their knees and had to crawl up holding out their hands to be punished on the slightest pretext; he recalled how the Brother in his shabby black gown stood stiff and rigid, with his habit rolled up beneath his arm, the better to strike his pitiless blows—Brother Crust-to-cook, as he was called, because he was the cook. He remembered how the dear Brother cried “ha!” and how his little inky fingers tingled with the pain as if ants were biting them. As Hortense cried aloud in dismay at the brutality of such punishments, he related others still more dreadful; for example, they were obliged to clean the freshly watered pavements with their tongues, the dust and water making a muddy substance that injured the tender palates of the naughty children.
“It is shameful! and you defend such people and speak in their favor in the Chamber?”
“Ah, my dear, that is politics!” said Roumestan calmly.
As they talked they were threading a labyrinth of small, dingy streets, almost oriental in their character, where old women lay asleep on their doorsteps, and other streets, though not so sombre, where long pieces of printed calicoes fluttered in explanation of signboards on which were painted: “Haberdashery,” “Shoes,” “Silks.”
Thence they came out on what was called in Aps the “Little Square,” with its asphalt melting in the hot sun and surrounded by shops, at this hour closed and silent, in the narrow shadow of whose walls boot-blacks slept peacefully, their heads resting on their boxes, their limbs stretched out like those of drowned people, wrecks of the tempest that has just swept over the town. An unfinished monument occupied the centre of the little square. Hortense wished to know what was ultimately to be the statue placed upon it and Roumestan smiled in an embarrassed way.
“It is a long story!” he answered, hurrying on.