The theatre wherein was enacted the “Donkey's Skin,” very much amplified and more elaborate, had now a permanent place in my aunt Claire's room. Little Jeanne, more interested in it since the additions to the scenery and the text, came over oftener; she painted backgrounds under my direction, and the moments I enjoyed most were those in which I impressed her with my great superiority. We had now a box full of characters, each with a name and a role; and the fantastic processions were made up of regiments of monsters, beasts and gnomes made out of plaster and painted with water colors.
I recall our delight and enthusiasm when we tried for the first time the effect of a scenic background which we had made to represent the “void of heaven.” Delicate rosy clouds, bespeaking the dawn, floated over the blue expanse that was softened and paled by the gauze hanging in front of it. And the chariot of a silken-haired fairy, drawn by two butterflies and suspended on invisible threads, advanced towards the centre of the scene.
But in spite of our efforts our work was never finished, for we took no account of limitations; every day we had new ideas and ever more and more wonderful projects, and the great comprehensive representation was deferred from day to day, was postponed to a future that never came.
Every undertaking of my life will be, or has already been, left unfinished and incomplete as was that little play of the “Donkey's Skin.”
CHAPTER LII.
Among those professors who seemed, during my school-days, so severe, and indeed almost cruel to me, the most terrible without any exception were the “Bull of Apis” and the “Big Black Ape” (I had nicknames for all of them). I hope should they read this they will understand that I am writing from the child's view-point. Should I meet them to-day I would, in all probability, humbly tender them my hand and ask their pardon for having been such an unmanageable pupil.
Oh! the Big Ape especially, how I hated him! When from the height of his desk these words fell upon my ear: “You will do a hundred lines; I mean you, you little sap-head!” I could have flown at his face like an enraged cat. He was the first to arouse in me those sudden and violent outbursts of rage that characterized me as a man, outbreaks which could scarcely have been foreseen in a child of my sweet and patient disposition.
I would be doing myself a great injustice in saying that I was altogether a bad scholar, I was, rather, an unequal and erratic one; one day at the head of my class, the next day at the foot; but on the whole I maintained a fair average, and at the end of the year I received the prize for translation—I won no others however. It surprised me that every one in the class did not receive the prize that I had won without great effort, for translation was extraordinarily easy for me. On the other hand I found composition very difficult, and narration still more so.
Little by little I deserted my own work-desk, and in my aunt Claire's room, near the china bon-bon bear, I underwent with as much resignation as possible, the torture that the preparing of my tasks imposed. On the wainscoting of the wall, in a hidden recess of the room, there is still visible, among the other fantastical sketches, a pen-portrait of the “Big Ape”; the ink has faded to a light yellow, but the drawing has endured, and when I look at it I again feel a sort of deadly weariness, and a sensation of suffocation chills me through and through—in short I once more live over those dread school-days.