“Above all, be good at school,” said my mother to me as she left.
One morning Arthémise carried me half asleep into the drawing-room. I wanted to be put back to bed. My grandmother said severely to me that it should not be done, that Arthémise was to dress me and that I was to go to school.
I was before the fire in the large drawing-room with its four windows, which seemed to my childish ideas immense and which has much shrunken since, and I was passed from grandmother’s lap to Arthémise’s. They dressed me, after having washed me, the which I did not like, although it amounted to but little, only my face and my hands, and grandfather did not even wish that they should “clean me” every day—they did not say “wash” in those days—water, he declared, made pimples on the face.
Ah! how that surgeon cultivated microbes! He could not have suffered much from the want of a dressing-room when in the army. One cannot imagine nowadays how little they washed themselves in our Picardy in the year of grace 1839. They soaped their faces only on Sundays in the kitchen and their hands every morning.
My grandfather, who the barber, Lafosse, shaved every morning in the drawing-room at dawn, wiped his face with the towel under his chin when it was untied, and that was all. And yet he looked clean, his white cravat and his pleated shirt-front were always perfectly immaculate, spotted over only with snuff, which he would knock off with graceful little gestures with his finger and thumb. As to my grandmother, she was always handsomely dressed and had her hair arranged every day by the barber, Lafosse.
In the rooms of the hotels of Picardy, which had been occupied by travellers, cobwebs would be found at the bottom of the water-jug long after the epoch of which I speak.
VI
FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL
INSTEAD of one of my numerous pretty gowns, grandmother dressed me in a green frock which I did not like.
To my surprise my grandfather, after the barber’s departure, did not leave immediately to go to his hospital. He looked at me and kept repeating: