“Blondeau, why has grandmother caused me this great grief, for which I shall never be consoled?”
“Because she could never find such a chance again, and it is for your dot.”
Then I burst forth.
“Oh! yes, again for money—that money which makes the misery of my life. It is like the inheritance for which mamma would have let me die! Grandmother is going to kill me that I may have a dot!”
This time it was I who provoked the “family drama,” and what a drama it was! I showed myself on this occasion the passionate child of my violent-tempered father. My anger and my hardness towards my grandmother made her suffer terribly.
I shut myself up in my room for more than a fortnight. Arthémise brought me my meals. I would open my door only to her. Neither Blondeau, grandfather, nor my friend Charles were allowed to enter. My grandmother did not even dare to come upstairs. I wrote her every day a letter filled with cruel reproaches, to which she had not the courage to reply.
Her great fear was that my father would arrive and that I would wish to leave her forever. However, to tranquillize her on that score, there was a serious quarrel pending between herself and my father at that time, the latter having wished to borrow money from her to pay the debts of his soldier-brother, who led a wild life; and as she had refused, they had not seen each other for two months.
I thought of Blérancourt, where the garden was small, to be sure, but was separated from other gardens only by hedges, where I should have my father, who I certainly loved as much as grandmother; but my mother’s coldness, compared with grandfather’s exuberance and gaiety, frightened me. And then at Blérancourt there was no Blondeau nor friend Charles. Besides, I knew very well that, although my mother was jealous of grandfather’s affection for me, she would blame me for abandoning her, would say I was ungrateful, and, moreover, I could not think of explaining to her grandmother’s reason for selling the garden and her anxiety regarding my dot.
These reflections following one another in my mind, at times made me indulgent toward grandmother, but, as soon as I thought of the destruction of my garden, I suffered so acutely that I listened no longer to justice.
I thought also of asking my aunts to take me, of writing to Marguerite to come with Roussot some night, when I would give her rendezvous in the little street des Juifs on which our garden opened, so that she could steal me away; but I had the secret instinct that if my aunts were very happy to have me two months in the year, at the time when they lived out of doors, my turbulence, my superabundance of gaiety, of life, my passion for movement, would tire them during a whole year through.