XXXVII
I BEGIN TO STUDY HOUSEKEEPING
WHEN I returned to Chauny my grandmother, whom I found more affectionate, more lovable than ever, said to me:
“Now, my dear Juliette, you shall do what you choose; you shall learn only what pleases you, or nothing at all, if you prefer it; but I ask you to take an interest in housekeeping. You shall have entire charge of ours for six months. You shall order, you shall spend as if you were absolute mistress. I reserve for myself only the right of giving you advice. As you love order, to arrange things, and to ornament a house, it will be easy for you to do all this with taste. If you desire to have lessons in cooking, you have only to tell me. I should like you to realise how much an art embellishes life—that of music especially. The new organist is a remarkably good professor. I know you do not care for the piano, but I should like you to cultivate your voice, and I should be glad if you would try the violin; but, I repeat, you shall do just as you choose in everything.”
“I shall be delighted to keep house, grandmother, it will amuse me a great deal; and I will try the violin, it is original; I will cultivate my voice also, and, since you leave me absolutely free to do as I please with regard to my ordinary studies, that will give me time, grandmother, to reflect about the little I know of elementary things.”
I reflected so seriously that, after a few days, I told grandmother that I would ask my father to draw me up a plan of study, so that while becoming the prospective mistress of a house—which idea fascinated me more and more—I could improve myself somewhat in spelling, arithmetic, geography, and French literature, of which I knew but little.
I suggested to grandmother an idea that pleased her—to have M. Tavernier, the master of the school where my father had been professor, give me lessons, as he was particularly clever, it was said, in inspiring his pupils with a love of study.
My father approved all my plans, especially that of having chosen for my professor a man whose merits he had heard praised.
He began by telling me I must copy five pages of Racine every day, and he read to me the first five pages, pointing out to me the beauty of the phrases, the musical sonority of the words. It was curious that my father, with his exaggerated, ardent political opinions, should be purely classical in his literary tastes, having an admiration only for the literature of the ancient Greeks and their imitators.
What admirable lessons I received from him during the few hours he spent at Chauny! We both worked in my pretty, well-ordered room, always full of flowers, whose old furniture he disliked, calling it “trumpery,” but where he was happy, all the same.
“Literature is the great consolation,” my father said to me; “everything else fails us, that alone remains. At Epidaurus the doctors of ancient times declared that the last traces of an illness did not disappear until the convalescent person had felt his mind enlarge with admiration on listening to the verses of Sophocles and of Euripides.”