Midnight, that fantastic hour which children know not, and which we point out to them as the unattainable limit of their wakefulness! What incredible efforts I made not to fall asleep before the appearance of the little old man. 1 had at once a great desire and a great fear to see him; but I could never keep awake.
The love of sound, so strong in children, found an outlet in playing with some brass wirework on the doors of an alcove near her bed.
My special amusement before going to sleep was to run my fingers over the brass network. The little sounds that I drew thence seemed to me a heavenly music, and I used to hear my mother say, “There’s Aurore playing the wirework.”[wirework.”]
Her vivid recollection enables her to describe with a sure touch the oddly mixed and capriciously changeful feeling of children towards their dolls and other simulacra of living creatures. She somehow had presented to her a superb Punch, brilliant with gold and scarlet, of whom she was greatly afraid at first, on account of her doll. Before going to bed she securely shut up this last in a cupboard, and laid the brilliant monster on his back on the stove; but her anxieties were not yet over.
I fell asleep very much preoccupied with the manner of existence of this wicked being who was always laughing, and could pursue me with his eyes into all the corners of the room. In the night I had a frightful dream: Punch had got up, his hump had caught on fire on the stove, and he ran about in all directions, chasing now me, now my doll, which fled distractedly. Just as he was overtaking us with long jets of flame, I awoke my mother with my cries.
Her childish way of looking at dolls is thus described in another place:—
I do not remember to have ever believed that my doll was an animated being; nevertheless, I have felt for some of my dolls a real maternal affection.... Children are between the real and the impossible. They need to care for, to scold, to caress, and to break this fetish of a child or animal that is given them for a plaything, and with which they are wrongly accused of growing disgusted too quickly. It is quite natural, on the contrary, that they should grow disgusted with them. In breaking them they protest against the lie.
She only broke those, she adds, that could not stand the test of being undressed, or that proclaimed their unfleshly substance by falling and breaking their noses. The fluctuations of childish feeling in this matter, and the triumph of faith over doubt in the case of a real favourite, are prettily illustrated in a later story of how she parted from her doll when she was going from home on a long journey.
At the moment of setting out I ran to give it a last look, and when Pierret promised to come and make it take soup every morning, I began to fall into a state of doubt, which children are wont to feel respecting the reality of these creatures, a state truly singular, in which nascent reason on one side and the need of illusion on the other combat in their heart greedy of maternal love. I took the two hands of my doll and joined them over its breast. Pierret remarked that this was the attitude of a dead person. Thereupon I raised the hands, still joined, above the head, in the attitude of despair or of invocation. With this I associated a superstitious idea, thinking that it was an appeal to the good fairy, and that the doll would be protected, remaining in this position all the time of my absence.[[333]]
The gift of vivid imagination is probably quite as much a torment as a joy to a child, as the story of Punch suggests. Aurore’s finely strung nervous organisation exposed her to a preternatural intensity of fear, and made any clumsy attempt to ‘frighten’ by suggestion of ‘black hole,’ or other childish horror, more than ordinarily cruel. One day she had been with her mother and Pierret on a visit to her aunt. On returning towards the evening she was lazy and wanted the amiable Pierret to carry her. So to spur her on her mother threatened in fun to leave her alone if she did not come on. The child knew it was not meant, and daringly stopped while the others made a feint of moving on. It happened that a little old woman was just then lighting a lamp hard by, and, having overheard the talk, turned to the child and said in a broken voice, ‘Beware of me; it is I who take up the wicked little girls, and I shut them in my lamp all the night’.