During the first few months at the college, I had got leave from the Father Superior to visit the Felicianis. A young priest accompanied me. But the Felicianis were not at the Hôtel de Mayence; no one knew anything about them; the hotel itself had changed hands after the fashion of these small hotels, the short chapters of whose histories have for heading "Bankruptcy."
Then I forgot.
Little by little the beautiful Countess and the sprightly Eloise faded from my mind. Never entirely, but they passed to the region of ghosts, the limbo of things half remembered.
I was not a diligent student. Good for nothing much except drawing. I was an artist born, I believe, and had the artistic temperament, which takes a delight in all things brilliant and beautiful, and tuneful and grand, and holds in abhorrence all things dull and most things useful. Smuggled novels and the poems of De Musset were the literature of my heart. D'Artagnan and Bussey were my heroes, and Esmeralda, that brilliant and gemlike creation, was my mistress.
Life is a love-story, a story that Nature alone can teach you to read. And what are the poets and the great writers of prose but Nature's priests, who repeat her litanies? Yet love-stories were banned at the Bourdaloue, and Dumas was accounted a child of Satan. Which statement is a preface to the comedy of my eighteenth birthday, or, in other words, the twelfth of May, 1869.
I was to leave school on that day. The Vicomte de Chatellan was to entertain me at déjeûner. I was to have rooms at his house in the Place Vendôme; I was, in fact, to burst my sheath and become a dragon-fly. I was to have an allowance of four hundred a year, to teach me, as the Vicomte said, the value of money. Joubert was to be unearthed from the Château de Saluce, and constituted my valet. Blacquerie, the Viscount's tailor, and Champardy, his bootmaker, had already called and taken the measurements for my new wardrobe. I can tell you I was elated; and no debutante ever looked forward more eagerly to the day of her debut than I to the twelfth of May.
At ten o'clock the Vicomte called for me. He was received in the salon by the Principal and two of the Fathers. They liked me, these men, and I liked them; and though I had imbibed Jesuitism as little as a rock imbibes the sea-water in which it is immersed, I respected Père Hyacinthe, and I loved, without any reserve, Father Ambrose, a bull-necked Arlesian, who, incapable of hurting a fly in practice, burnt heretics in theory, for ever, and for ever, and for ever in hell.
As we got into the Vicomte's carriage, this same Father Ambrose came running out, and, just as we drove off, popped into my hand a little green-covered book on the seven deadly sins.
"What's that?" asked the Vicomte, as I turned the leaves.
I showed it to him. "Pshaw!" said he, and flung it out of the window.