As this was our only glimpse of real country the windows in my aunt Bertha's room had always a great attraction for me. Especially had they in the evening at sunset, for from them I could watch the sun sink mysteriously behind the prairies. Oh! those sunsets that I saw from my aunt Bertha's windows, what ecstasy overcast with melancholy they awakened in me! The winter sunsets seen through the closed windows were a pale rose color. Those of summer time, upon stormy evenings, after a hot, bright day, I contemplated from the open window, and as I did so I would breathe in the sweet odors given out by the jasmine blossoms growing on the wall: it seems to me that there are no such sunsets now as there were then. When the sunsets were notably splendid and unusual, if I was not in the room, aunt Bertha, who never missed one, would call out hastily: “Dearie! Dearie! Come quickly!” From any corner of the house I heard that call and understood it, and I went swift as a hurricane and mounted the stairs four steps at a time. I mounted the more rapidly because the stairway had already begun to fill with dread shadows; and in the turnings and corners I saw the imaginary forms of ghosts and monsters that at nightfall always pursued me as I ran up the stairs.
My aunt Bertha's room, with its simple white muslin curtains, was as modest as my grandmother's. The walls, covered with an old-fashioned paper in vogue at the commencement of the century, were ornamented with water colors similar to those in my grandmother's room. The picture that I looked at most often was a pastel after Raphael of a virgin in white, blue and rose color. The rays of the setting sun always fell upon this picture (I have already said the hour of sunset was the time I preferred most to be in this room). This virgin was very much like my aunt Bertha; in spite of the great difference in their ages, one was struck with the resemblance between the straight lines and regularity of their profiles.
On this same floor, but upon the street side, lived my other grandmother (the one who always dressed in black) and her daughter, my aunt Claire, the person in the house who petted me most.
Upon winter evenings, after I had been to my aunt Bertha's room to see the sunset, it was my custom to go to them. I usually found them together in my grandmother's room and I would seat myself near the fire in a little chair placed there for me. But the twilight hour spent with them was always a disturbing one. . . . After all the amusements, all the day's running and playing, to sit in the dusk almost motionless upon my tiny chair, with eyes wide open, uneasily watching for the least change in the shadows, especially on that side of the room where the door opened on the dim stairway, was very painful to me. . . . I am sure that if my grandmother and aunt had known of the melancholy and terrors which the twilight induced in me, they would have spared me by lighting the lamp, but they did not know my sufferings; and it was the custom of the aged persons by whom I was surrounded, to sit tranquilly at nightfall in their accustomed places without having need for a lighted lamp. As it grew darker one or the other, grandmother or aunt, would draw her chair closer to me, and when I had that protection about me I felt completely happy and reassured and would say: “Please tell me stories about the Island.”
The Island, that is the Island of Oleron, was my mother's native place, my grandmother's and aunt's also, which they had quitted twenty years before my birth to establish themselves upon the main land. The Island, or the least thing that came from it, had a singular charm for me.
It was quite near us, for from a garret window at the top of the house we could, upon a very clear day, see the extreme end of its extensive plain; it appeared a little bluish line against a still paler one which was the arm of the ocean separating us from it. . . . To get to it we had to take a long journey in wretched country wagons and in sailing boats; and often our boat had to make its way there in the teeth of a strong gale. At this time in the village of St. Pierre Oleron I had three old aunts who lived very modestly upon the revenues of their salt marshes (the remains of a once great inheritance), and their annual rents which the peasants still paid with sacks of wheat. . . . When I went to visit them at St. Pierre there was for me a certain joy, mingled with many kinds of conflicting emotions, which I cannot explain, in trying to picture to myself their once great station.
The Huguenot austerity of their manners, their mode of life, their house and their furniture all belonged to a past time, to a bygone generation. The sea surrounded and isolated us, and the wind constantly swept over the moorland and over the great stretches of sandy beach.
My nurse was also from the Island, of a Huguenot family, which descending from father to son had been with us for a long time; and she would say: “At home, on the Island,” in such a way that with a wave of emotion I understood her great homesickness for it.
We had about us a number of little articles that had come from there, and which had places of honor in our home. We had some black pebbles large as cannon-balls, that had been chosen from the thousands lying on the Long-Beach because centuries of washing had polished and rounded them exquisitely. These pebbles always played an important part every winter evening, for with the greatest regularity the old people would put them into the chimney-place where a wood fire blazed and crackled; afterwards they slipped them into calico bags of a flowered pattern, also brought from the Island, and took them to bed where they served to keep their feet warm during the night.
In our cellar we had wooden props and firkins, and also a number of straight elm poles for holding the washing which had been cut from the choicest young trees in my grandmother's forest. I had the greatest veneration for all these things. I knew that my grandmother no longer owned the forests, nor the salt marshes, nor the vineyards; for I had heard them say that she had sold them one at a time to put the money into investments upon the mainland; and that an incompetent notary by his bad investments had greatly reduced her income.