Going to bed there was always a very enlivening proceeding, especially when there was the prospect of a whole Thursday of play before me. I would, I am sure, have been very much afraid in the guest chamber, which was on the ground floor of the great, isolated house; but until my twelfth year I slept on the floor above, in the spacious room occupied by Lucette's mother;—with the aid of screens they had made for me a little room of my own. In this retreat there was a book-case with glass doors that belonged to the time of Louis XIV; this was filled with treatises, a century old, upon navigation, and with sailors' log-books that had not been opened for a hundred years. Tiny, scarce visible butterflies, that entered by the open windows, were to be found here all summer long, sleeping with extended wings upon the whitewashed walls. And often the most exciting incident of the day happened just as I was falling asleep; sometimes then an unwelcome bat found his way into the room and circled wildly about the lighted candles; or an enormous moth buzzed in and we would chase him with a cobweb-broom. Or again a storm descended upon us and the great trees lashed their branches against the house, and the old shutters slammed back and forth, and we waked with a start.
CHAPTER XXXV.
Now comes the apparition of another little friend who stood very high in my childish favor. As nearly as I can remember I became acquainted with her when I was eleven; Antoinette had left the country; Veronica was forgotten.
Her name was Jeanne, and she was the youngest member of a naval officer's family, that like the D——-s had been bound up in friendship with ours for more than a century. As she was two or three years younger than I, I had at first taken but little notice of her—probably I thought her too babyish.
Her face was as droll as a little kitten's, and it was impossible to tell from the pinched up features whether she would become pretty or ugly; but she had a certain grace, and when she was eight or nine years old her face became very sweet and charming. She was very roguish, and as friendly as I was diffident; and as she darted about in those childish dances we sometimes had in the evenings, and from which I held myself aloof, she seemed to me the extreme of worldly elegance and coquetry.
But in spite of the great intimacy between our families, it was evident that her parents looked upon our friendship with disfavor, they probably thought it unseemly that she had chosen a boy for her companion. This knowledge caused me much suffering, and the impressions of my childhood were so vivid and persistent that I did not, until many years had passed, until I became quite a grown youth, pardon her father and mother the humiliation they had caused me.
It therefore resulted that my desire to play with her increased greatly. And she, knowing this, was as perverse as a princess in a fairy tale; she laughed mercilessly at my timid ways, at my awkward manners and my ungraceful fashion of entering the parlor; there was kept up between us a constant interchange of playful raillery, an oral stream of inimitable pleasantry.
When I was invited to spend the day with her the prospect gave me the greatest joy, but the aftertaste of the visit was generally bitter, for usually I committed some mortifying blunder in that family where I felt myself so misunderstood. Every time I wished to have Jeanne at my house for dinner it was necessary for my aunt Bertha, who was a person of authority in the eyes of Jeanne's parents, to arrange the matter for me.
Upon one occasion when little Jeanne returned from Paris she related to me the story of the “Donkey's Skin,” which she had seen acted at the theatre in the city.