Grandmother seemed to me at that time really to be the incarnation of what people said of her—“romantic.” I loved her just the same as before; I paid her in my heart the same tribute of affection I owed her, and which she deserved, but I was much more attracted by the minds of my father and of aunt Sophie, and felt great curiosity about them. I loved Nature as aunt Sophie loved it, and I was interested in the past history of Nature according to the Greek and Latin poets, and I suffered with my father for the misery of mankind, for the wretchedness of the poor and the unfortunate in life.
“Aunt Sophie,” I asked her once, “why is it that all that you show me which is so divine in Nature, hides from me that God who is so great and so far off, and whom grandmother taught me to adore? Why is it that I care no longer for the sufferings of ‘misunderstood souls’”—this was one of grandmother’s sayings—“and that I care a great deal more for the welfare of poor miserable wretches?”
“It is just because God is so great and so far off that you are too little to understand Him,” answered aunt Sophie. “When you are as old as I am”—she was forty-six and grandmother a little over forty-eight—“everything will find its place in your understanding, especially if the basis of what you know is built on a sure foundation. You must be able to touch with your feet the ground you walk on. Mother Goose certainly said that before I did. You must love intensely all that lives while you live. I am a child of Nature; I live in it and for it. Your father loves mankind, and wishes it to be happy, because he, himself, is so human.”
At Blérancourt I had adopted the habit of writing down in a little book a summary of the conversations I had with my father. Aunt Constance, having found the book in one of my pockets, was always teasing me about the depth of my reflections. I let her laugh, but, when in possession of my “Notes of Blérancourt” again, I added to them my “Notes of Chivres,” and the serious thoughts exchanged with aunt Sophie.
I kept this little book, written in small handwriting which only I could read, until I came to Paris, when, to my great regret, it was lost, but the sense of what was therein written has never left my memory.
XV
THE END OF MY HOLIDAY
MARGUERITE was appointed to show me the environs of Chivres. I put on my pretty frock, and for a week, the harvest being over, seated on my friend Roussot’s back, I roamed over the lovely valley through which runs the river Aisne. I saw the whole country between Soissons and Chivres, and around Chivres itself.
Marguerite took me to see the Dolmens, the Druid stones, of which aunt Sophie had told me the history and legends. On the evening when I returned from my visit to the Dolmens, I refused to wear my peasant clothes, and appeared at table in a white frock, with a wreath of mistletoe and laurel-leaves on my head, dressed as a Druid priestess of my Gauls.
Grandmother and my father did not write to me for fear of tiring me. Had they known that aunt Sophie was teaching me Latin and other things beyond my age, they would have grieved at having been parted from me for so long a time and for no benefit to my health, as they would have thought.