She ceased wearing short dresses and took to long ones, for very shame of her thin limbs. She wore thick clothes and corsets to pad herself out. She grew introspective, spending long hours alone or playing silently with her infant sister Régine, or reading books. Once Mlle. de Brabender discovered her on her knees and, on inquiry, obtained the confession that she had been praying steadily for nearly three hours.
The religious habit again grew on her. The subjects for her brush were mostly saints, surrounded with the conventional halo. She hung her room with religious pictures, some done by herself and some bought cheaply at a shop near the Church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. Over her bed was a crucifix, modelled by herself from wax.
She was confirmed at the age of sixteen years and five months, and wore the virginal white for days afterwards—until it grew so dirty, indeed, that her exasperated mother made her throw it away.
A priest had given her a rosary that had been dipped in the holy waters of Lourdes, and this she wore continually. In the quarter she became known as “la petite religieuse.” Doctors shook their heads, and predicted that she was falling into a decline, from which she would never recover. Her suitors fell off, one by one, until only a retired miller, Jacques Boujon, a man of fifty, remained.
To English readers it may seem incredible that a girl of sixteen should have had actual suitors, and among them men of position and wealth. This was nevertheless common in France in the middle of the last century, and it is by no means rare in the France of to-day. Added to this was Julie Van Hard’s intense desire to rid herself, once and for all, of this strange child she had brought into being, whose sombre presence in her house of gaiety seemed to be a perpetual mockery.
One day Sarah was visited in her bedroom, where she was studying, by her mother and Mlle. de Brabender.
“I want you to put on this new dress I have bought you, and then come down to the salon. There is something particularly important we have to say to you,” said Julie.
Sarah shivered. There seemed something extraordinarily portentous in her mother’s manner. Who were “we”? The child felt, as she told me years later, that that moment represented a cross-roads in her life.
Overwhelmed with a dread she could not define, Sarah put her new dress on with trembling fingers and descended to the salon. There she found quite a company awaiting her. Foremost in the party was the Duc de Morny. Next to him was her mother. Across the table was Jean Meyedieu, her father’s notary-public. Next to him was Aunt Rosine. Madame Guérard, wearing an anxious look, occupied a seat near the fireplace. Mlle. de Brabender, accompanied by Jeanne, followed Sarah in.
The door was closed. Then Julie turned to her daughter. “Some months ago,” she said, “you refused to consider a proposal of marriage from an honorable gentleman.”