My father, just then, thought of leaving Blérancourt. Grandmother’s entreaties and mine prevented him from accomplishing another folly which would have caused him to lose the position he had acquired.
He wished to join the phalanstery at Condé-sur-Vesgres. The deputy, Baudet Dulary, having given a large portion of his fortune to Victor Considérant, to make an experiment of Fourier’s doctrines, my father desired to take part in this trial, which later failed lamentably, but to which one of his friends, of whom I have spoken, lent his active aid.
During the spring of 1850 a theatrical troupe came to Chauny. I had never been to the theatre, except to hear the opera of Charles VI. at Amiens, at the time of my first railway journey. I had read a great many plays of all kinds, for I devoured books like my grandmother, but I had never seen a play acted in reality.
Blondeau decided that he would take me to see the drama, Marie-Jeanne, ou, La Fille du Peuple. Grandmother disliked so much to go out that grandfather accompanied Blondeau and me.
The wife of my grandfather’s barber, Lafosse, who came to shave him every day, and who lived in the Chaussée quarter, was a milliner. Grandmother commissioned Mme. Lafosse to make me a pretty blond lace cap, trimmed with narrow pink ribbon. They wore bonnets when they went to the theatre at Chauny, but a pretty cap was more elegant than a bonnet.
People looked at me a great deal, and grandfather and Blondeau kept whispering together, and I knew they were talking of me, but Marie-Jeanne interested me more than my own appearance.
I heard people say several times: “How old is she?”
The young men looked at me more boldly at the theatre than in the street, and I saw they were talking together about me, and I soon knew they were not making fun of my cap with narrow pink ribbons, which I feared they might do before I went to the theatre.
I cried so much over Marie-Jeanne that I returned home with my eyelids swollen. Grandmother, who was waiting for me, said I was very silly to have disfigured my eyes in that way. But grandfather and Blondeau calmed her by whispering to her as they had whispered to each other.
All grandmother’s friends, men and women, came to see her during the week following the representation of Marie-Jeanne, and told her I had made a “sensation.”