Among the pupils at the school were a good many young men whom I knew, brothers or relatives of my former schoolmates. They were all aware of the cause of my having been sent away from the Mlles. André’s school, and admired me as a “valiant” young girl, an expression frequently used in my behalf in my family, and with which grandmother always endowed me.
I copied and recopied my composition. I devoted myself to it with such intense interest that it gave me a fever, and I was proclaimed the winner by my rivals themselves. One of them came to bring me the news and to congratulate me. I was about to kiss him, when grandmother made me an imperious sign, so I simply thanked him, with warm gratitude.
“What!” grandmother said to me afterward, “were you going to kiss that boy? Why, look at yourself, you are a young girl; you are no longer a child.”
“But, grandmother, I shall not be fourteen before six months.”
“Everyone takes you for sixteen,” she said.
Grandmother sent my father, my aunts, and my father’s family, copies of my famous composition, which she wrote out herself, keeping the original, which I found twenty years after.
From that moment I thought of nothing but literature, and my imagination became intensely excited.
A chiromancer came to Chauny at that time, and my grandmother greatly desired that he should read my hand. He declared that he distinctly saw “the star of celebrity near Jupiter” in my hand, and he added: “I shall see that hand again some day;” and he did, in fact, recognise it twenty years afterward one day on the Riviera, when it was not possible for him to suspect who I was. From that day my grandmother never doubted about my future destiny.
At that time I made my family act the parts of Camoën’s Lusiades. Each one of us had his or her rôle; and, for more than a year, my grandparents, Blondeau, even my father, who had become “Mousshino d’Albuquerque,” preserved the character of the heroic personages we had chosen. We intermingled, to our great amusement, fiction with daily life, and laughed heartily when commonplace events compromised the dignity of “Vasco da Gama,” whom I represented.
My grandfather, the “giant Adamastor,” called his pigeons by reciting a passage of the Lusiades to them. We knew the admirable poem literally by heart. And how amusing it was when a cart passing in the street would shake our house, which had become our vessel! What sorrowful reflections we had on the dangers we were running! My dramatis personæ revolted against my demands sometimes, especially at table, where we were all gathered together. I would, on such occasions, quiet my rebels by draping my napkin around my body to recall the flag scene. The mixture of our admiration for the poem and the absurdities of our interpretations was so amusing that it was difficult for us to lay aside the Lusiades to take up Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, with which I was delighted.