“Ta, ta, ta!” replied my grandfather, whose resistance always ended with those three syllables.
My grandmother took me to the school. I realised that it was an extraordinary event to which I was obliged to submit.
My friend the grocer was at his door. He bowed to grandmother, much surprised to see her in the street “on a working-day,” and told her so. She answered that she was taking me to school for the first time.
“You want to make her a learned lady,” he replied.
The butcher’s wife was at her desk in her open shop. She, also, ran to the door astonished, and asked grandmother where I was going with my black apron—was it a punishment? “Because for you, Madame Seron, to be out with your Juliette in the street, she must have been very bad, indeed,” she added, laughing heartily.
I wanted more and more to cry again.
The large door of the school, of the prison, opened and shut behind us with a noise like thunder.
We went into a court where the large and small pupils were together. Madame Dufey, the school-mistress, appeared. She had mustaches, I thought her ugly, and she terrified me.
“I had the mother, I have the daughter now. I am delighted,” she said. But her voice seemed to roar.
My grandmother made a motion to leave me. I clung to her skirts. I implored. I rolled on the floor. I was choking, and I repeated, sobbing: