“Come, come!” Aunt Deen would reply, “such pretty children! You are only too proud to show yourself in their company.”
None the less I agreed with him that the presence of my sisters spoiled our walks. One can never talk about anything with women along. They don’t understand out-of-door things, and they get cross as soon as one touches upon religion. I was not very far—I who had shown such fervour at my first communion—from thinking that mother exaggerated the importance of our having missed that service. I thought myself free, because I had closed my mind against all teaching except what came to me from grandfather. Being free, one could do as he pleased. We were not hindering the others from going to church, and even to the communion, and vespers into the bargain.
Vacation came and completely interrupted our walks by ourselves. After vacation school would begin, and I should resume my place among the little school boys of my own age, without so much as knowing that the previous three months had quite changed my heart.
BOOK III
I
POLITICS
AFTER my long convalescence I did indeed return to school. It was an ancient institution in which kindly monks imparted antiquated instruction. It was possible to work there, when one’s schoolfellows did not positively put obstacles in the way, but it was easier to devote oneself to clandestine industries, such as training flies and cockchafers, drawing caricatures, reading forbidden books, and even carrying on explorations through the passages. The discipline was no better than the teaching. Up to this time the idea had never occurred to me to view as a prison this great building with its numerous doors and windows where one came and went as one pleased under the paternal eye of a new porter, entirely absorbed in the care of his flowers and of a tortoise whose manners he was studying. But I was now new-born to the sentiment of liberty, and consequently to that of slavery. I made every effort therefore to discover that I was unhappy.
On holidays I resumed my walks with grandfather. An involuntary complicity established itself between us. If one or another of my brothers or sisters joined us we spoke only of indifferent things. When we were alone we went into rhapsodies over the joys of the fields and the brotherhood of men, only hindered by property with all its enclosures. I learned that money was the cause of all ills, that one should despise and do away with it, and that the only necessary good things cost nothing, namely, health, the sunlight, pure air, the songs of birds and all the pleasures of the eye. My teachers, who were much more interested in Latin than in philanthropy, neglected to teach me the latter except by their example, to which I paid no attention. No more towns, no more armies (and Bernard, who was preparing at Saint-Cyr, and who had never been informed of these truths!), no more judges, no more lost lawsuits, no more houses. But here I thought that grandfather was going rather too far. No more houses! What about ours, then? Ours which had been repaired and all done over! It mattered little about the others, so long as ours was spared.
“Why no, little dunce; pastoral peoples used to sleep out of doors. It’s more hygienic.”
When Abraham journeyed to the land of Canaan he must have slept out of doors, and so must the shepherds whom we had met leading their flock to the mountains.
We made another pilgrimage to the pavilion which I had come to call Helen’s pavilion, and from time to time we put in an appearance together at the Café of the Navigators, so that I did not entirely lose contact with my friends.