My private reading was voracious, sharpened by years of unconscious hunger. I read novels, poetry and travel, chiefly in French: one subject became an enthusiasm, the history of France, and one part of that subject a mania.
Of the glory of this world I knew nothing. It burst on me now in one vision, one shape, one glad triumphant name: the name and shape and vision of France. I devoured every map, every picture, every book of geography or history the library contained. I learnt to know the living soul and lilting name of each river and city and province, from this Normandy of Châteaux and cider-orchards and Vikings and churches to Provence loved of the sun and limned by the Midland Sea; from fervid Gascony to brave Lorraine. I loved the victorious shape: that stands firm on the straight Pyrenees, turns a proud Breton shoulder to the wide Atlantic, and bears on the breast of old Alsace the swing and swerve of the whole eastward Continent. Best of all I loved the story: Gauls and Romans, Troubadours and Crusaders, Kings and Dauphins, Huguenots and Leaguers, lilies and eagles, laughter and war. I see them always as from some hilltop, a tented and bannered multitude spread on a vast twilight plain beneath me, reaching to the utmost horizon of history.
Above them all, in the highest heaven, there shines a Star. It is Napoleon.
I lived every moment from the island-birth to the island death, from Ajaccio to the Rock; knew the emotion of each time so well that I believed I could have been Napoleon, came to feel I had been Napoleon, and could revel in retrospective megalomania with no betrayal of Resolution: for I was weaving no futures for myself, but living another's past. Another's, yet mine. For as I read I found that I remembered the lonely childhood, the sour school-days; the hopes of '96, the springtide of Italy; the summertide of glory; Austerlitz, Notre Dame, the crown of battles and the crown of gold; with God's revenge for good days gone:—the wintertime of Russia; the defeat, the disaster, the desertion; the giant self-pity of Longwood. Ah, those were great days. And now I was Mary.
For a long time I thought the Nephew ridiculous. The pictures I saw everywhere portrayed a kind of sleepy Uncle Simeon, bloated, heavier, stupider, but not less crafty. But I kept my thoughts to myself. For the family were staunch adherents of the reigning Emperor.
Then, one day, Elise gave me a book describing his younger days. Again I found that I remembered. I was Louis-Napoleon too. He was the great Napoleon. We were all one. In the world there was only one Person. Every one was every one else. My heart—God—once more I had nearly reached the Mystery....
He was a real Napoleon, this living King, who, when as a little child they tore him away from the Tuileries (when the uncle fell and was abandoned), cried out aloud in rage prophetic: "I shall come back," and through madness and mockery and passion and prison—came back.
If books were my most personal pleasure, I settled down to enjoy every phase of the new easeful life: fine bedroom and boudoir (I would exult aloud that they were mine); perfect servants who spared you cleaning your own boots, making your bed and folding your clothes; bright days in the park with Suzanne and her chatter; rides, drives, picnics; excursions to Jumièges, to Caudebec, to neighbouring mansions, to old Rouen, jewelled with wonderful papist churches. A "No English after dinner" rule of the Countess' enabled me to improve my French almost to perfection, and this acquisition of another tongue contributed to the change in my character: words make thoughts rather than thoughts words: language is the lord of life. Soon this new insouciant way of treating life, which but a few weeks earlier would have been incomprehensible, appeared the natural one. I forgot love, and God, and misery. Mary II had won. Bear Lawn became distant and half-real. A thin bridge of memory, which Resolution forbade me to traverse, spanned the widening gulf between the two lives. The very intenseness of the old days was the reason they so soon became unreal. I had learnt to live each instant in over-intense and concentrated fashion: I could not do it in the present and past as well.
None of my minor fears were realized. I had thought my humble upbringing might make itself seen; but no, to all and sundry I was announced as "the cousin of a Lord" (lusciously pronounced laurrr by the Countess) and taken for granted as a young English gentlewoman of orthodox antecedents. I justified my pleasure by the reflection that it was all literally true, though in my heart I knew that the true Me was poor middle-class go-to-Meeting Mary. All my ways were found "so English, so quaint, so Puritan, so clever, so charming." Well-chosen hints of the oddness and rigour of Bear Lawn excited interest, amusement, pity, each in their turn delectable: how it pleased, flattered, touched me! The Clinkers and Aunt Jael became victims in a repertoire, butchered to make a Norman holiday. Nor need I have feared for my table-manners with these French aristocrats who wiped their plates with their bread and supped and squelched and chewed in almost Glorian fashion; while Aunt Jael in hawkiest mood never rivalled the mesmeric stare which Madame la Comtesse de Florian bestowed on other people's plates.