“Well, well,” said father, “I have promised your grandmother and your mother to let you make your first communion as they desire. They have taken your childhood from me, let them keep it; but your youth shall belong to me, and we will talk again about all this. I have now, to calm me and to make me wait patiently, the anticipation of the happy days that I foresee, and the result of all that you, my dear Juliette, have just been saying to me.”
“Having my garden no longer, I must forget all that I loved and learned in it, so as not to suffer too much in having lost it,” I replied. “I have so many dead things to weep over,” I continued, “I have heard so many trees sigh and utter their last cry when they were cut down, that in thinking of it, I seem to hear them again and my heart aches, for it is dreadful to have destroyed so many of those old companions that gave us such delicious fruit to make us love them, and it is a crime to have covered with gravel the good earth which would always have brought forth the seeds planted in it and borne harvests.”
On the evening of that day my father stopped at a post-relay at a large, clean, and bright-looking inn, where I went to see a dozen chickens roasted on a spit in the kitchen. The travellers by diligence dined there.
When my father put me to sleep in one of the huge beds in our room, I was feverish, and talked all night of my garden. He prevented me from speaking of it the next day, and told me some lovely stories of Greece which he had not yet related to me.
Our journey ended without further incident, and I found grandmother wildly happy at seeing me again; but as we had arrived late at night, and as I was tired, they put me to bed at once. Grandmother wished that I should sleep near her that night, as my father had spoken of my fever, and the door having been left open, I heard him say to my grandparents:
“I don’t think she can ever be consoled for having lost her garden.”
“As it is clear that she will marry a country gentleman,” said grandfather, laughing, “and, as the education she is receiving from her aunts will probably incline her to marry some perfect Roussot, she will be able after her honeymoon to treat herself to some trees and grounds, so we need not pity her present unhappiness in an exaggerated manner.”
My grandparents had quarrelled, as usual, during my absence. I had the proof of it in grandmother’s answer. The “they” and “one” which I had nearly banished, had returned to their conversation.
“One is always joking,” she said, “even about what touches me the most—Juliette’s sorrow. Since I have seen how much she suffers from being deprived of her garden, I reproach myself bitterly for having taken it from her. One should understand that, and not laugh, when one knows that I would not have run the risk of giving pain to Juliette without having been moved by a feeling which was in her interest, but which I cannot express to everybody.”
“Well, well,” grandfather replied, “one has no need of a lesson; one loves one’s grandchild as much as mother and father and grandmother. One only jokes about Juliette’s sorrow, and one will continue to do so for the simple reason that one thinks it will be the best way to console her.”