“No, there’s no quaver!”
“This is a flat!”
“No, you forget the sharp! How absurd you are, mademoiselle,” added my mother, perfectly furious.
A few minutes later my mother went to her room and Mlle. Clarisse departed, muttering as she left.
As for me, I was choking with laughter in my bedroom, for one of my cousins, who was a good musician, had helped me to add sharps, flats, and quavers, and we had done it with such care that even a trained eye would have had difficulty in discerning the fraud immediately. As Mile. Clarisse had been sent off, I had no lesson that day. Mamma gazed at me a long time with her mysterious eyes, the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen in my life, and then she said, speaking very slowly:
“After luncheon there is to be a family council.”
I felt myself turning pale.
“All right,” I answered, “what frock am I to put on, mamma?” I said this merely for the sake of saying something, and to keep myself from crying.
“Put your blue silk on, you look more staid in that.”
Just at this moment, my sister Jeanne opened the door boisterously and with a burst of laughter jumped on my bed and slipping under the sheets called out: “I’m there!”