“Arthémise, put her to bed,” she ordered in a calm voice. “You must tell me when she has gone to sleep.”
During the following days it was impossible to prevent my relating in detail my horrible experience. I talked of it, I cried over it, and they could not make me stop. Arthémise, my grandparents, my friend Charles, were all obliged to listen to the recital, and I did not become calm until I had the sure conviction that I had made those who loved me suffer, the suffering that I myself had endured. I promised my grandmother, however, that I would not relate my history to my parents at Blérancourt. Arthémise and grandmother together arranged about my going to school.
I returned there later, influenced to do so by a little friend of my own age, whom they had made me know, and who taught me how to amuse myself with pictures of the letters of the alphabet.
VII
I GO TO A WEDDING
A FEW months later, in the summer, I went to Blérancourt with my grandfather to a wedding. I had already seen a great number, Arthémise having a passion for looking at brides, but I had never participated in person at the ceremony.
A friend of my mother, Camille—I cannot recall her family name—was going to marry Monsieur Ambroise Godin, under-director of the manufacture of glass of Saint-Gobain, the head office of which was at Chauny. My grandfather was to be her witness, and grandmother took the trouble to explain to me that the witness to a marriage acted in place of the bride’s father, Camille having lost her own.
My joy at going to the wedding expressed itself in all manner of freaks and excessive selfishness. I neither showed nor felt the least sorrow at leaving grandmother and Arthémise. However, my absence was to be only for four days.
My grandfather, since my “campaign of Caumenchon,” as he called it, had conceived such a passion for me that he stayed for long hours together in the house, even after meals. In the evening, when I so wished it, I would also keep him at home. His friends at the club could not believe their eyes.
“He is his granddaughter’s slave,” would they say, and he would repeat: “Yes, I am my granddaughter’s slave.”