That night, at dinner, they had a festival in my honour without saying anything to me about my misbehaviour. It was not the time to scold me. I was not at all consoled for the loss of my garden, for my flowers and fruit, for all its greenery, or even for its snow.
I did not see the first flowers blossom, I did not gather them for grandmother’s table, nor for the little white vase in which I was wont to arrange artistically the first Bengal roses.
As soon as the fine weather came, and during all that spring, the workmen were pulling down the rampart behind the high garden-wall, and everything fell in together. They cut a new street, on which the large principal door of the school was to open. The buildings were to be raised only twenty yards from our courtyard; the green wooden lattice was at once replaced by an ugly wall.
All the noise of the demolition of the garden broke my heart. During the night, the moaning of the wind made me think that I heard the death-sighs of my trees.
One Thursday afternoon, when I was playing sadly in the courtyard, I heard a sharp cry, a whistling, and a sort of tearing apart. Something was certainly being torn up and was resisting and groaning with all its power. I felt it must be the death-torture of my apricot tree. Formerly, at this time of the year the sap would rise to the smallest twigs on its branches, and I could see its first buds. Now they were torturing it.
This uprooting of my apricot tree revived all my sorrow. Behind that odious wall its agony was taking place.
I imagined that I could see devastation ending its cruel work. They were digging up the last vestiges of the life of my trees—their roots—and they were levelling the ground. I suffered from it all so much that I was nearly ill.
XXII
MY FIRST RAILWAY JOURNEY
THE reconciliation between my father and my grandmother was brought about by a friend of my uncle Amédée (an uncle whom none of us at Chauny knew, because he never left Africa). This friend had paid my uncle’s debts in time to prevent his being obliged to resign his commission as an officer.