XIX
I BEGIN MY LITERARY WORK
I DO not know whether it was from my aunt Sophie’s influence, or my contact with nature, living amid it, or whether it was the slow, clever training of my mind by my father, that made my brain swarm with poetical, mythological, and classical images. I dreamed in turn of Homer and of Virgil, whom I called his great-nephew, in order to give him the same degree of relationship to Homer as that which I possessed towards aunt Sophie.
In September and October of that year, after I had returned to Chauny, I thought I had become a poet. I wrote rhymes about everything I saw: the sun, the moon, the heavens, birds, flowers, fruit, and even about the vegetables in my large garden at Chauny, in which I lived all day during the last months of my vacation.
I confided with trembling my first “poem” to grandmother, and she criticised it with deep emotion. I criticised it myself later with extreme humiliation and contrition. I was already a well-instructed girl, and I might have done far better, but my grandparents found this poetry so beautiful that they read and re-read it to all comers, and grandfather took it with him to his club.
The idea of writing some day most certainly came to me at this time, for I did not cease to cover paper with verses and prose from that day.
I said to myself what was a curious thing for a girl of my age to think: that one must feel deep emotion in order to write and to move others, and I sought all manner of pretexts to arouse my emotions.
There was at the end of our large garden, at the foot of a very high wall, a plot of currant-bushes, too much in the shade to yield much fruit; so they were allowed to grow at will, mixed with raspberry bushes and brambles.
I had a circular place made for me in this underwood. I carried some garden chairs and a table to it, and I called this corner “my temple of verdure.” No one but myself was allowed to enjoy it. I lived there, during my vacations, from breakfast to dinner-time, dreaming, when the weather permitted, and, above all, telling myself stories in which I took extreme delight.
I put so much emotion into my voice that it made my heart ache. I would often cry bitterly over the unhappiness, the sufferings, the vicissitudes of the misery I invented.
I can hear myself even to-day, and see myself sitting amongst my brambles, with the shadow of the high wall falling upon me, and beginning my story in this wise: