The young, spirited horse delighted my father and me. He took up all our attention at first. We looked at nothing else. Ah! what was his name?
The groom told us it was Coq or Cock. He didn’t know whether it was “Coq” or the English name.
“‘No! no, never in France, never shall England reign!’” I cried, recalling the air I had heard in Charles VI. “It shall be Coq.”
Coq almost flew along the road. After a while the groom left us, telling us the names of the villages and the post-relays where we were to stop during the day, or were to sleep at night.
My father and I recalled our longest drives around Blérancourt, but they were not like this one—a real journey. He laughed at all my observations and reflections, and said often to me: “Ah! you are, indeed, my daughter. You resemble me more than any one else.”
We had left Amiens at eleven o’clock in the morning, and had not yet, at five o’clock in the afternoon, thought of making our first halt. We had brought some fruit and cakes, and so long as our handsome Coq was not tired we determined to continue our way.
“Juliette,” said father to me, at a time when Coq was going slower, “have you never asked yourself whether I could indefinitely submit to our separation, if I could always bear the pain of seeing your mind fashioned by others than myself? My greatest ambition is to make your mind the offspring of my own. It will come some day; it must be so.”
I answered nothing. I said over to myself my father’s phrase: “Make your mind the offspring of my own,” and I thought to myself that as I was his daughter, my whole self should be his also; but then, being grandchild of my grandmother, whom I adored, how could I be at once all my grandmother’s and all my father’s? The feeling I had of the difficulty brought about by my double love for my grandmother and my father, the thought of sharing myself between them, filled me with sadness, and my heart ached as I thought I should feel in the future, more and more deeply, the sorrow I might cause each when I left either of them, because each would feel when I returned that I would come back with my heart and mind filled with the one whom I had left. I was still angry at my grandmother for having sold my garden. The large house at Chauny, which formerly pleased me more than the small one at Blérancourt, seemed like a prison now. The yard, full of flowers, had been gay only because it preceded the garden; cut off from it, it would look, under the shadow of the great wall they were building, like a little plot resembling those in the graveyards.
My father thought also of many sad things; our gaiety now ran away from us, and we could not regain it. All my childhood spent in that beloved garden came back to me: the springtime, with the rows of violets along the walls at its end; the summer, with the baskets of strawberries that I would run to pick myself, as we were sitting down at table; fruits of all kinds, whose growth I watched with such interest, and which I kept tasting—apples, pears, plums, cherries, and apricots, enjoying the greatest delight a child can have—that of eating to its fill all kinds of fruit throughout the whole year.
“Papa, do you approve grandmother’s having sold her garden?” I asked him suddenly, determined all at once to confide my sorrow to him, without speaking of the dot.