“YOU are in luck,” my brothers would say to me as they prepared to face the dreaded examinations for the baccalaureate, bending from morning till night over their books through all the trying July heat; “no school, no examinations, no possible failures for you.”
“And no piano,” Louise would add, for having given evidence of an aptitude for music she had been set to work at never-ending five-finger exercises.
Even little James, rebellious under his first lessons in reading and writing, confided to his inseparable Nicola that when he was big he would do like François.
“What does Francis do?” she would ask.
“Nothing.”
The month of August drew on without awaking that impatience which its approach had never failed to arouse in me until this year; I even felt a selfish regret as it came nearer. Vacation would rob me of that superiority which convalescence had conferred upon me, and would put me back into my place, the common life. Or rather, I supposed it would do so, being incompetent to measure the chasm that had opened between the little boy that I had been yesterday, and what I had now become. Some one had measured it before me.
I had become much absorbed between my walks and my visits to the Café of the Navigators, whither grandfather, who was no longer happy without my companionship, was taking me regularly. Though I was rather unobservant of the acts and doings of the family, I again became aware of an atmosphere of anxiety at our house, and of secret conferences that recalled to me the days when the destiny of our property had been at stake.
Father’s voice was penetrating, even when he moderated it and believed himself to be speaking softly.
“We shall have no fortune to leave them,” he was saying. “We must neglect nothing in their education. They must be armed for life.”
We, armed? Why should we be armed? Nothing was easier than life. I had outgrown wooden swords, heroic biographies, epic stories. All I should need would be a few tools for working in the ground, which furnishes men abundantly with all they need. One would harvest so much as was necessary, one would live on white cheese, sweet cream and wild strawberries, and listen to Martinod, preaching universal peace and proclaiming the arrival of the golden age. How simple the programme! What need was there of arms?