II
Madame Amédée Fleurissorie, née Péterat, the youngest sister of Veronica Armand-Dubois and Marguerite de Baraglioul, answered to the outlandish name of Arnica. Philibert Péterat, a botanist, who had acquired some celebrity under the Second Empire on account of his conjugal misfortunes, had as a young man determined to give the names of flowers to any children he might happen to have. Some of his friends considered the name of Veronica which he gave to his first-born, somewhat peculiar; but when it was followed by the name of Marguerite and people insinuated that he had climbed down—given in to public opinion—conformed to the commonplace, he determined in a cantankerous moment to bestow upon his third product a name so resolutely botanical as to stop the mouths of all back-biters.
Shortly after Arnica’s birth, Philibert, whose temper had become soured, separated from his wife, left the capital and settled at Pau. His wife would linger on in Paris during the winter months, but every spring, at the beginning of the fine weather, she would return to Tarbes, her native town, and invite her two elder daughters to stay with her there in the old family mansion which she occupied.
Veronica and Marguerite divided the year between Tarbes and Pau. As for little Arnica, whom her mother and sisters looked down upon (it is true she was rather foolish and more pathetic than pretty), she spent the whole time, summer as well as winter, with her father.
The child’s greatest joy was to go botanising in the country; but the eccentric old man would often give way to his morose temper and leave her in the lurch; he would go off by himself on an inordinately long expedition, come home dog-tired and immediately after the evening meal take to his bed, without giving his daughter the charity of a word or a smile. When he was in a poetical mood he would play the flute and insatiably repeat the same tune over and over again. The rest of his time he spent drawing portraits of flowers in minute detail.
An old servant, nicknamed Réséda, who was both cook and housemaid, looked after the child and taught her what little she knew herself. With this education, Arnica reached the age of ten hardly knowing how to read. Fear of his neighbour’s tongues at last brought Philibert to a better sense of his duty. Arnica was sent to a school kept by a Madame Semène, a widow lady who instilled the rudiments of learning into a dozen or so little girls and a very few small boys.
Arnica Péterat—guileless and helpless creature—had never until that moment suspected that there might be anything laughable[E] in her name; on her first day at school its ridicule came upon her as a sudden revelation; she bowed her head, like some sluggish water-weed, to the stream of jeers that flowed over her; she turned red; she turned pale; she wept; and Madame Semène, by injudiciously punishing the whole class for its indecorous conduct, added a spice of animosity to what had before been a boisterous but not unkindly merriment.
Long, limp, anæmic and dull-eyed, Arnica stood with dangling arms, staring stupidly, in the middle of the little schoolroom, and when Madame Semène pointed out “the third bench on the left, Mademoiselle Péterat,” the whole class, in spite of reprimands, burst out again louder than ever.
Poor Arnica! Life seemed nothing but a dreary avenue stretching interminably before her and bordered on either side by sniggers and bullyings. Fortunately for her, Madame Semène was not impervious to the little girl’s misery, and she soon found a refuge in the widow’s charitable bosom.
When lessons were over, Arnica was glad enough to stay behind at school, rather than go home to find her father absent; Madame Semène had a daughter, a girl who was seven years older than Arnica and slightly hump-backed, but good-natured; in the hopes of catching a husband for her, Madame Semène used to have Sunday evening “at homes,” and on two Sundays a year she would even get up a little party with recitations and dancing; these parties were attended by some of her old pupils, who came out of gratitude, escorted by their parents, and by a few youths without either means or prospects, who came out of idleness. Arnica was always present—a flower that lacked lustre—so modest as to be almost indistinguishable—but yet destined not to go altogether unperceived.