What are the other images? A large space, with old trees in it, some children playing late on an autumn day; while others, who are not playing, but only look on, lean against the old brown tree-stems, or wander about like forsaken creatures. This is the playground of the Lycée at Versailles. The scholars who are playing are the "old" boys, the others, the shy exiles, are the "new," and I am one of the latter. It is just four short weeks since my aunt told me of my mother's marriage, and already my life is entirely changed. On my return from the holidays it was decided that I should enter the school as a boarder. My mother and my stepfather were about to travel in Italy until the summer, and the question of their taking me with them was not even mooted. My mother proposed to allow me to remain as a day-pupil, under the care of my aunt, who would come up to Paris; but my stepfather negatived the proposition at once by quite reasonable arguments. Why should so great a sacrifice of all her habits be imposed upon the old lady, and what was there to dread in the rough life of a boarding-school, which is the best means of forming a boy's character?
"And he needs that schooling," added my stepfather, directing the same cold glance towards me as on the day when he grasped my arm so roughly. In short, it was settled that I was to go to school, but not in Paris.
"The air is bad," said my stepfather.
Why am I not in the least obliged to him for his seeming solicitude for my health? It was not because I foresaw what he had foreseen already—he, the man who wanted to separate me from my mother for ever—that it would be easier for them to leave me at a school outside the city than at one nearer home, when they returned? What need has he of these calculations? Is it not enough that he should give utterance to a wish for Madame Termonde to obey him? How I suffer when I hear her say "thou" to him, just as she used to say it to my own father. And then I think of the days when I came home from my classes at the Lycée Bonaparte, and that dear father helped me with my lessons. My stepfather brought me to this school yesterday in the afternoon, and it was he who presented me to the head master, a tall thin personage with a bald head, who tapped me on the cheek and said:
"Ah, he comes from Bonaparte, the school of the 'Muscadins.'"
That same evening I had the curiosity to refer to the dictionary for this word "Muscadin," and I found the following definition: "A young man who studies personal adornment." It is true that I do not resemble the fellows in tunics among whom I am to live, for I am handsomely dressed, according to my mother's taste, and my costume includes a large white collar and smart English boots. The other boys have shapeless képis, coarse blue stockings which fall over their broken shoes, and their buttons are mostly torn off. They wear out the last year's outdoor costume in the house. During the first play-time on my first day, several of the boys eyed me curiously, and one of them asked me: "What does your father do?" I made no answer. What I dread, with unbearable misery, is that they may speak to me of it. Yesterday, while my stepfather and I were coming down to Versailles in the railway carriage, without exchanging a word, what would I have given to be able to tell him of this dread, to entreat him not to throw me among a number of boys, and leave me to their heedless rudeness and cruelty, to promise him that I would work harder and better than before, if I might but remain at home! But the look in his blue eyes is so sharp when they rest on me, it is so hard for me to say the word "Papa" to him—that word which I am always saying in my thoughts to the other; to him who lies, in the sleep that knows no waking, in the cemetery at Compiègne! And so I addressed no supplication to M. Termonde, and I allowed myself to be shut up in the Versailles Lycée without a word of protest. I preferred to wander about as I do among strangers, to uttering one complaint to him. Mamma is to come to-morrow; she is going away the next day, and the nearness of this interview prevents me from feeling the inevitable separation too keenly. If she will only come without my stepfather!
She came—and with him. She took her seat in the parlour, which is decorated with vile portraits of scholars who have taken prizes at the general examinations. My schoolfellows were also talking to their mothers, but none could boast a mother so worthy to be loved as mine! Never had she seemed to me so beautiful, with her slender and elegant figure, her graceful neck, her deep eyes, her fine smile. But I could not say a word to her, because my stepfather, "Jack," as she called him, with her pretty affectation of an English accent, was there between us. Ah! that antipathy which paralyses all the loving impulses of the heart, how intensely have I felt it, then and since! I thought I could perceive that my mother was surprised, almost saddened by my coldness when she bade me farewell; but ought she not to have known that I would never show my love for her in his presence? She is gone; she is on her travels, and I remain here.
Other images arise which recall our schoolroom in the evenings of that first winter of my imprisonment. The metal stove burns red in the middle of the gas-lit room. A bowl of water is placed upon the top lest the heat should affect our heads. All along the walls stretches the line of our desks, and behind each of us is a little cupboard in which we keep our books and papers. Silence reigns, and is rendered more perceptible by the scratching of pens, the turning over of leaves, and an occasional suppressed cough. The master is in his place, behind a desk which is raised above the others. His name is Rodolphe Sorbelle, and he is a poet. The other day he let fall out of his pocket a sheet of paper covered with writing and erasures, from which we managed to make out the following lines:
Je voudrais être oiseau des champs,
Avoir un bec,
Chanter avec:
Je voudrais être oiseau des champs,
Avoir des ailes,
Voler sur elles.
Mais je ne puis en faire autant,
Car j'ai le bec
beaucoup trop sec,
Et je suis pion,
'Cré nom de nom!
This prodigious poem gave us, cruel little wretches that we were, the greatest delight. We sang the verses perpetually, in the dormitory, out walking, in the playground, setting the last words to the classic music of "Les Lampions." But the old watch-dog has sharp teeth, and defends himself by "detentions," so none of us care to brave him to his face. The lamp hung over his head shows up his greenish-grey hair, his red forehead, and his threadbare coat, which once was blue. No doubt he is rhyming, for he is writing, and every now and then he raises that swollen brow, and his large blue eyes—which express such real kindness when we do not torment him with our tricks—search the room and observe in turn each of the thirty-five desks. I, too, take a prolonged survey of the companions of my slavery; I already know their faces. There is Rocquain, a little fellow, with a big red nose in a long white face; and Parizelle, a tall, stout boy, with an underhung jaw. He is fair-skinned, has green eyes and freckles, and for a wager ate a cockroach the other day. There is Gervais, a brown, curly-haired lad, who makes his will every week. He has communicated to me the latest of these documents, in which there is the following clause: "I leave to Leyreloup some good advice, contained in my letter to Cornélis." Leyreloup is his former friend, who played him the trick of rolling him in a heap of dead leaves last autumn, having been egged on to the deed by big Parizelle, whom the vengeful Gervais ever since regards as a rascal, and the advice contained in the posthumous letter is a warning to distrust the giant. All this small school-world is absorbed in countless interests which even at that time I held to be puerile, when compared with the thoughts that are in me. And my schoolfellows themselves seem to understand that there is something in my life which does not exist in theirs; they spare me the torments that are generally inflicted upon a new boy, but I am not the friend of any of them, except this same Gervais, who is my walking companion when we go out. Gervais is an imaginative lad, and when he is at home he devours a collection of the Journal pour Tous. He has found in it a series of romances called "L'Homme aux Figures de Cire," "Le Roi des Gabiers," "Le Chat du Bord," and Thursday after Thursday, when we go out walking, he relates these stories to me. The tragic strain of my own fate is the cause of my taking a grim pleasure in these narratives, in which crime plays the chief part. Unfortunately I have confided the secret of this questionable amusement to my good aunt, and the head master has separated the improvised feuilletoniste from his public. Gervais and I are forbidden to walk together. My aunt believed that the excess of sensitiveness in me, which alarmed her, would be corrected by this. Neither her solicitous tenderness, nor her pious care and foresight—she comes to Versailles from Compiègne every Sunday to take me out—nor my studies—for I redouble my efforts so that my stepfather should not triumph in my bad marks—nor my religious enthusiasm—for I have become the most fervent of us all at the chapel—no, nothing, nothing appeases the hidden demon which possesses and devours me. While the evening studies are going on, and in the interval between two tasks, I read a letter from Italy. This is my food for the week, conveyed in pages written by my mother. They give me details of her travels, which I do not understand very clearly; but I do understand that she is happy without me, outside of me—that the thought of my father and his mysterious death no longer haunts her; above all, that she loves her new husband, and I am jealous—miserably, basely jealous. My imagination, which has its strange lapses, has also a singular minuteness. I see my mother in a room in a foreign inn, and spread out upon the table are the various fittings of her travelling-bag, silver-mounted, with her cipher in relief, the Christian name in full, and encircling it the letter T. Marie T——. Well, had she not the right to make a new life for herself, honourably? Why should this mixture of her past with her present hurt me so much? So much, that just now, when stretched upon my narrow iron bed in the dormitory, I could not close my eyes.