“This is how one can fool those who make perquisitions!”
I told my parents that I had learned the importance of the papers from what my mother had said, and of my fondness for finding hiding-places.
My father recovered from his emotion, and felt great indignation.
“Such a republic,” he said one day, soon after the famous visit, “is more odious to me than the monarchy has ever been. May I see before long those who pretend to serve this Republic of lies, and who, really, only try to persecute Republicans, grovel before one and the same tyrant, and all be crushed together under his heel!”
XXXIX
AN OFFER OF MARRIAGE
I PITIED my father for all he was suffering from the bottom of my heart, but had not, in truth, his own Utopian ideas brought about what he called “the lawless reaction”? Grandmother said to me: “Juliette, how can you expect a country to consent to be guided politically by good people as mad as your father? They make public opinion fly to the extreme opposite of their quixotic ideas.” And I agreed with her at last.
During all the latter part of that year and the beginning of the next, I studied very hard, and I recall with pleasure one of my first literary successes. My professor, Monsieur Tavernier, the master of the boys’ school situated opposite to our house, in order to create a double emulation among his pupils, proposed for me to compete with them for a prize.
The entire town was talking at that time of a terrible storm that had occurred in April, and had made several victims, and of which the quiet people of Chauny could not yet speak without fright.
My professor gave the narration of the events of this storm to his pupils and to me as our theme for competition. I had followed and observed every detail of the storm, and had even noted down my observations at the time: the fright of the birds, the trembling of the leaves, the moaning of the trees, shaken by the blast; the terror of the people who passed by, the disturbed heavens, the near or distant sonority of the claps of thunder, the jagged streaks of lightning, the terrible noise of a thunderbolt which I thought had nearly killed me. Thinking the storm over, and stifling with heat, I had sat down in a current of air between two open windows, opposite to each other. The deafening thunderbolt burst and traversed the two windows, throwing me off my chair on to the floor. I described all this with much feeling.