I should probably have been insupportable had not my grandparents, both of whom were very gay and witty, kept up a spirit of fun between us which banished all gravity, even in questions of quarrels, instead of preserving a tone of stiff, solemn, and stately importance, so that, when I succeeded in hushing up a quarrel between them, it was usually because I had made them laugh.
My father, also, submitted to this course of action on my part, but it exasperated my mother, who would always say:
“I will never admit that a joke should get the better of a grief.”
Might it not be probable that my great-aunts would resemble my mother in character? Ah! in that case I would resign my mission very quickly, so much the worse for the inheritance! I would write at once to be taken home.
“My sisters cannot be dull,” grandmother said to me. “Having remained unmarried, they certainly must have kept their original characters.”
The great day for my departure for Chivres arrived. What an excitement, to be going to pass two months away from my father and grandmother, and with old people whom I had never seen, and on whom I must make a favourable impression, “or else suffer the humiliation of being sent home,” said grandfather.
I was going to be shut up in a sort of cloister. My three great-aunts, their mother, and a servant whom they had had for twenty-five years, lived alone in an old house, situated in an enormous domain surrounded by high hedges and walls. This was the description my great-aunts’ friend gave to us of “the convent.”
My grandfather was to take me, with my packages sewed up by Arthémise, as far as two leagues beyond Coucy-le-Château. Grandmother told me to look well at “the monstrous feudal towers of Coucy.” Marguerite, my aunts’ servant, would await us at the village, her native place, at her mother’s house on the Square opposite a cross. She would meet me there with my aunts’ donkey. I was to dine at her mother’s cottage, after which we would leave Coucy, taking cross-roads, and would arrive at Chivres late at night.
I had been much sermonised by grandmother before I left, and on our way grandfather continually joked me about my “mission à la Talleyrand.”
“Your old aunts must die of ennui,” he said to me; “you will amuse them, and they won’t return the compliment, if I remember them rightly. Sophie will teach you Latin, she knows it very well; you will use some of it with Marguerite in the kitchen, perhaps also with the donkey, and you must bring back to me what remains of it. Mind you don’t forget, for I have great need of it.”