“Shall I go and find the children? Haven’t they told them that their grandmother is here?”
“I didn’t want to disturb them at their work. But I believe it must be over now—listen!”
Behind the door they could hear the shuffling impatience of the children anxious to be out in the open air, and the old woman enjoyed this state of things, doubling her maternal desire, and hindering her from doing anything to hasten its pleasure. At last the door opened. The tutor came out first—a priest with a pointed nose and great cheek-bones, whom we have met before at the great dejeuners. On bad terms with his bishop, he had left the diocese where he had been engaged, and in the precarious position of an unattached priest—for the clergy have their Bohemians too—he was glad to teach the little Jansoulets, recently turned out of the Bourdaloue College. With his arrogant, solemn air, overweighted with responsibilities, which would have become the prelates charged with the education of the dauphins of France, he preceded three curled and gloved little gentlemen in short jackets, with leather knapsacks, and great red stockings reaching half-way up their little thin legs, in complete suits of cyclist dress, ready to mount.
“My children,” said Cabassu, “that is Mme. Jansoulet, your grandmother, who has come to Paris expressly to see you.”
They stopped in a row, astonished, examining this old wrinkled visage between the folds of her cap, this strange dress of a simplicity unknown to them; and their grandmother’s astonishment answered theirs, complicated with a heart-breaking discomfiture and constraint in dealing with these little gentlemen, as stiff and disdainful as any of the nobles or ministers whom her son had brought to Saint-Romans. On the bidding of their tutor “to salute their venerable grandmother,” they came in turn to give her one of those little half-hearted shakes of the hand of which they had distributed so many in the garrets they had visited. The fact is that this good woman, with her agricultural appearance and clean but very simple clothes, reminded them of the charity visits of the College Bourdaloue. They felt between them the same unknown quality, the same distance, which no remembrance, no word of their parents had ever helped to bridge. The abbe felt this constraint, and tried to dispel it—speaking with the tone of voice and gestures customary to those who always think they are in the pulpit.
“Well, madame, the day has come, the great day when Jansoulet will confound his enemies—confundantur hostes mei, quia injuste iniquitatem fecerunt in me—because they have unjustly persecuted me.”
The old lady bent religiously before the Latin of the Church, but her face expressed a vague expression of uneasiness at this idea of enemies and of persecutions.
“These enemies are powerful and numerous, my noble lady, but let us not be alarmed beyond measure. Let us have confidence in the decrees of Heaven and in the justice of our cause. God is in the midst of it, it shall not be overthrown—in medio ejus non commovebitur.”
A gigantic negro, resplendent with gold braid, interrupted him by announcing that the bicycles were ready for the daily lesson on the terrace of the Tuileries. Before setting out, the children again shook solemnly their grandmother’s wrinkled and hardened hand. She was watching them go, stupefied and oppressed, when all at once, by an adorable spontaneous movement, the youngest turned back when he had got to the door and, pushing the great negro aside, came to throw himself head foremost, like a little buffalo, into Mme. Jansoulet’s skirts, squeezing her to him, while holding out his smooth forehead, covered with brown curls, with the grace of a child offering its kiss like a flower. Perhaps this one, nearer the warmth of the nest, the cradling knees of the nurses with their peasant songs, had felt the maternal influence, of which the Levantine had deprived him, reach his heart. The old woman trembled all over with the surprise of this instinctive embrace.
“Oh! little one, little one,” said she, seizing the little silky, curly head which reminded her so much of another and she kissed it wildly. Then the child unloosed himself, and ran off without saying anything, his head moist with hot tears.