My father loved me so tenderly, so passionately, he took so much trouble with a few words, spoken here and there, to make his ideas interesting to me; he treated me so like a woman, desiring, I could feel, to overcome the repugnance with which my grandmother had inspired me concerning his democratic, Jacobite, free-masonic, anti-religious opinions—“without God, oh, heavens!”—which, like a spoiled child, I had often expressed to him, that this journey with him seemed to me a most serious thing. I fancied that his companionship during the next three weeks would do more toward drawing me to him, and taking me from grandmother, than absence itself.
“Jean Louis,” said my grandmother to him, after kissing him warmly, as he got into the carriage where I was already seated, “bring her back to me the same as I give her to you. You owe it to me!”
We were starting. My father answered, laughing:
“I do not promise any such thing.”
I heard grandmother cry out:
“Juliette, stay!”
A strong cut of the whip started the horse.
I did not turn back my head, but burst into tears. My father did not attempt to console me, as my grandmother would have done. She could never bear to see me cry.
He kissed me violently, repeating: “My daughter, my child, my own—at last, at last!”