Between my father and my grandmother I applied myself, instinctively at first, determinedly later, to be something. Was that the starting-point of my resolve to be somebody?
In the ceaseless struggle between my father and grandmother, myself being the coveted prize, there were three of us.
Many stories are involved in my souvenirs, more strange, more eccentric, one than the other, of the marriages of my grandparents and great-grandparents in my maternal grandmother’s family.
Their adventures interested my youth to such a degree that I should not hesitate to unfold them to the surprise of my readers were they not too numerous.
My grandmother, who talked and who related stories with a very quick, sharp, and bantering wit, took much pleasure in telling of the romantic lives of her grandmothers. She delighted in repainting for me all these family portraits on her side, never speaking to me of my father’s family, which I grew to know later.
She possessed the pride of her merchant and bourgeoise caste. I learned through her many obscure things in the history of the struggles of French royalty against the great feudal lords, the internationalists of that time.
She said, speaking to me of her own people: “We are descended from those merchant families of Noyon, of Chauny, of Saint-Quentin, so influential in the councils of the communes, of whom several were seneschals, faithful to their town, to their province above all, faithful to royalty, not always to the king, to religion, not always to the Pope; liberals, men of progress, of pure Gallic race, enriching themselves with great honesty and strongly disdaining those among themselves who, for services rendered to the sovereign, solicited from him titles of nobility.”
My grandmother’s mother, when fourteen years old, fell madly in love with one of her relatives from Noyon, who had come to talk business, and who, after a day’s conversation, more serious than poetical, and continued through breakfast and dinner, received at his departure the following declaration from her: “Cousin, when you come next year it will be to ask me in marriage.” They laughed much at this whim, but, as the young girl was an only daughter and would have a large dot, the relatives of Noyon, less well off, did not disdain the offer made to their son.
When she was fifteen, the precocious Charlotte married her cousin Raincourt, a very handsome youth twenty-two years of age, but she died in childbed the following year, giving birth to my grandmother.
The young widower confided little Pélagie to his wife’s mother, now a widow herself, and while my great-grandfather married again when twenty-four years of age, and had three daughters, who were very good, very properly educated—Sophie, Constance, and Anastasie—my grandmother grew up like a little savage and sometimes stupefied the quiet town of Chauny by the eccentricities of a spoiled child.