“I shall keep the child you abandoned, and whom I rescued from the poverty in which you had thrown her!”
“I will send policemen for her!”
“Try it! I will leave you all, and take Juliette off to a foreign country.”
Then followed terribly sad days for me. Assailed by letters from my father, who did not come to grandmother’s any more; by the visits of my mother, who always found a way of irritating me against my father and my grandmother, my life became insupportable.
I did not see my father for several months. All the family blamed him. During the time I passed with my aunts, they, who never had written to him, sent him a letter approving grandmother’s actions, and telling him he had no right to influence my mind with his eccentric ideas; that the majority of those who loved me possessed certain rights from the affection they felt for me.
In one of my letters to grandmother I spoke of this letter my aunts had written to my father, and she was deeply grateful to them for it.
Strangely, their intervention calmed her, and she began from that time to speak less bitterly of my father.
By degrees the quarrel was again patched up. I wished to see my father again. I suffered from my separation from him in my heart, and in the development of my mind. Becoming more and more attached to my studies on Greece, I needed a guide, and no one could replace my father. I told my grandmother how much I missed him, how my progress in the study of literature was arrested, and I laughingly added that she was hindering my future career as a writer by her spite.
One day in the autumn grandmother told me that she would permit me to pass Christmas and a part of January at Blérancourt.
My father’s sorrow was to be consoled, and mine also. I rejoiced at it with all my heart, and it was with transports of joy that we met again. My father evinced so much love for me, he was so tender, so occupied with everything that could please, amuse, or instruct me, that my mother, overcome by one of her outbursts of morbid jealousy, became openly hostile to my father, and continually tortured me.