“Le bon Valet, la bonne Dame, le bon Woi. Je wecommence.”
In September or October, Chérie would go for her holidays. I cannot remember if she went every year, but we had no one instead of her, and she left behind her a series of holiday tasks.
During one of her absences my Aunt M’aimée, another sister of my mother’s, came to stay with us. Aunt M’aimée was married to Uncle Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s Private Secretary. He came, too, and with them their daughter Betty. Betty had a craze at that time for Sarah Bernhardt, and gave a fine imitation of her as Doña Sol in the last act of Hernani. It was decided we should act this whole scene, with Margaret as Hernani and Aunt M’aimée reading the part of Ruy Gomez, who appears in a domino and mask.
Never had I experienced anything more thrilling. I used to lie on the floor during the rehearsals, and soon I knew the whole act by heart. I thought Betty the greatest genius that ever lived.
When Chérie came back she was rather surprised and not altogether pleased to find I knew the whole of the last act of Hernani by heart. She thought this a little too exciting and grown-up for me, and even for Margaret, but none the less she let me perform the part of Doña Sol one evening after tea in my mother’s bedroom, dressed in a white frock, with Susan in a riding-habit playing the sinister figure of Ruy Gomez. I can see Chérie now, sitting behind a screen, book in hand to prompt me, and shaking with laughter as I piped out in a tremulous and lisping treble the passionate words:
“Il vaudrait mieuxzaller (which I made all one word) au tigre même
Arracher ses petits qu’à moi celui que j’aime.”
Chérie’s return from her holidays was one of the most exciting of events, for she would bring back with her a mass of toys from Giroux and the Paradis des Enfants, and a flood of stories about the people and places and plays she had seen, and the food she had eaten.
One year she brought me back a theatre of puppets. It was called Théâtre français. It had a white proscenium, three scenes and an interior, a Moorish garden by moonlight, and a forest, and a quantity of small puppets suspended by stiff wires and dressed in silk and satin. There was a harlequin, a columbine, a king, a queen, many princesses, a villain scowling beneath black eyebrows, an executioner with a mask, peasants, pastry-cooks, and soldiers with halberds, who would have done honour to the Papal Guard at the Vatican, and some heavily moustached gendarmes. This theatre was a source of ecstasy, and innumerable dramas used to be performed in it. Chérie used also to bring back some delicious cakes called nonnettes, a kind of gingerbread with icing on the top, rolled up in a long paper cylinder.
She also brought baskets of bonbons from Boissier, the kind of basket which had several floors of different kinds of bonbons, fondants on the top in their white frills, then caramels, then chocolates, then fruits confits. All these things confirmed one’s idea that there could be no place like Paris.