During the first winter I spent in the boarding-school on the Rue de Vaugirard, the Brodard sisters were the mainstay of my life. It was not that I needed mainstaying in any of the regular classes, although we were driven like dogs by the grindingly thorough teachers, for lessons are lessons, wherever you find them, hard and tense though they may be in France, easy and loose in America. It was quite another part of our school life which routed me, the training in deportment and manners, carried on in three deadly sessions a week, by a wizened skipping old man, light and dry as a cork.
His little juiceless body was light, but everything else about him was heavy with the somber earnestness of his determination to teach us what he considered the manners of women of the world. Thrice a week we were obliged to begin those lessons by a ceremonious entry into the big salon, four by four, advancing in time to music across the bare shining desert of its waxed floors, counting furtively under our breaths, “one, two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,” as we courtesied to the Directrice, “advance again, one, two, three, four, glide, bend, recover, glide,”—here we saluted the Sous-Directrice—“advance again” (I was always shaking partly with giggles at the absurdity of the whole business, partly with fear of the terrible eye of Professor Delacour), “one, two three, four, glide, bend ...” but usually at this point of my attempted bow to the Professor of Deportment I was harshly told to go back and start the whole agonizing ritual over.
That was before the Brodard girls took me in hand and, flanking me on either side, swept me forward on the crest of their perfect advance and genuflection to the coveted place of safety on the other side of the room where, in a black-robed line, the little girls who had made a correct entry awaited further instructions in the manners of the world.
The support of the three Brodard girls did not stop short when they had engineered me through the matter of getting into a room. The professor himself was not more steeped in a religious sense of the importance of his instruction than were Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde Brodard. The insensate inner laughter which constantly threatened to shake the lid of my decorum, was safely muffled by their whole-souled attention as we stood there, watching the elegant gestures and still more elegant immobilities of Professor Delacour, as he explained the lesson of the day.
One day we were taught how to put money into the contribution-box in church, “not with a preoccupied, bored air, nor yet with a complacent smirk, but thus, gravely, with a quiet dignified gesture.” Then he would pass the velvet contribution bag down the line, and forty little girls must each find the right expression, “not bored, or preoccupied, not yet with a complacent, self-conscious look, gravely—quietly—with dignity.”
I can still feel in the pit of my stomach the quiver of mingled terror and mirth with which at twelve years of age, I prepared to be, “not bored or preoccupied, nor yet smirking and complacent, but quiet—dignified—” I would never have lived through it if I had not been hypnotized by the Brodard girls.
Or perhaps we were required to be ladies stepping from a carriage and crossing a side-walk to enter a theater, keenly conscious of the eyes of the crowd on us; but required to seem unaware of spectators, “graceful, moving with a well-bred repose, and above all, unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious.” Then two by two, squirmingly the center of all the eyes in the salon, we crossed the imaginary sidewalk and entered the imaginary door, “quiet, graceful, above all unconscious, entirely natural and unconscious....” Do you suppose for a moment I could have escaped annihilation at the hands of our High-Priest, if Clotilde Brodard had not been my fellow acolyte, applying all her orthodox convictions to the problem set before us?
Yes, the Brodard girls were an example to us all, in and out of the class in deportment, for they were as scrupulously observant of all the rules of good behavior in daily school-life as under the eye of Professor Delacour. Any chance observer would have been sure that they were preparing to enter the wealthiest and most exclusive society, an impression by no means contradicted by the aspect of their mother, a quiet, distinguished, tailored person, who brought them to school at the beginning of the term, and once in a while made the tiresome trip from Morvilliers to Paris to see them. But the Brodards must have had some training in genuine good-breeding as well as the quaint instruction given by Professor Delacour, for they never made any pretensions to wealth or social standing—they said very little of any sort about their home life.
Two years later I spent my Christmas vacation with them, and at once I understood a good deal more about them. Young as I was—fourteen at the time—it was plain to me as it would have been to any observer, that they took their lessons in “society manners” so seriously because society manners and any occasions for using them were the only things lacking in the home where they were so comfortable, so much loved, and so well cared for. They lived on a shabby street in Morvilliers, in a small apartment, with one maid-of-all-work; and although their mother had a genius for keeping everything on a plane of strict gentility, their big, gay, roughly clad, unceremonious father was the ramping red editor of the most ramping red radical newspaper in that part of France, the center of all the anti-everything agitations going on in the region.
As used to happen in Europe, in the far-gone days, when I was fourteen years old (but not at all as it happens now-a-days) what they called ramping and redness looked very plain and obvious to an American. Most of what M. Brodard was making such a fuss about, seemed to me just what everybody at home took for granted: for instance his thesis that every man ought to earn his own living no matter how high his social position might be. I was astonished that anybody could consider that a revolutionary idea. Among other things, M. Brodard was what people would call now-a-days a feminist, expounding hotly his conviction that women should be trusted with the responsibility for the conduct of their own lives, and the earning of their own livings. These opinions found no echo at all in the serious-minded middle-class families of his town, nor indeed in his family, but they were an old story to me. I told him as much, informing him confidently from my wide experience as a child in the impecunious faculty of a western State-University, that everybody in America expected as a matter of course to earn his and her own living—everybody! He accepted this as unquestioningly as I advanced it, with the fresh faith and enthusiasm which upheld him in all the generous quixotism of his life. I believe, indeed, that on the strength of my testimony he actually wrote some editorials about America in his furiously convinced style.