“You don’t know what an actress is,” said my aunt.
“Oh, yes, I do. Rachel is an actress!”
“You know Rachel?” asked mamma, getting up.
“Oh, yes, she came to the convent once, to see little Adèle Sarony. She went all over the convent and into the garden, and she had to sit down because she could not get her breath. They fetched her something to bring her round, and she was so pale, oh, so pale! I was very sorry for her and Sister Appoline told me that what she did was killing her, for she was an actress, and so I won’t be an actress, I won’t.”
I had said all this in a breath, with my cheeks on fire and my voice hard.
I remembered all that Sister Appoline had told me, and Mother Ste. Sophie, too. I remembered, also, that when Rachel had gone out of the garden, looking very pale, and holding a lady’s arm for support, a little girl had put her tongue out at her. I did not want people to put out their tongues at me when I was grown up.
Conservatoire! That word alarmed me. The duke had wanted me to be an actress and he had now gone away so that I could not talk things over with him. He went away smiling and tranquil, after caressing me in the usual friendly way. He had gone—caring little about the scraggy child whose future had been discussed.
“Send her to the Conservatoire!”
That sentence uttered so carelessly had come like a bomb into my life. I, the dreamy child, who that morning was ready to repulse princes and kings; I, whose trembling fingers had that morning told over chaplets of dreams, who only a few hours ago had felt my heart beating with emotion hitherto unknown to me; I, who had got up expecting some great event to take place, was to see everything disappear, thanks to that phrase as heavy as lead and as deadly as a bullet: “Send her to the Conservatoire!”
And I divined that this phrase was to be the signpost of my life. All those people had gathered together at the turning of the crossroads. “Send her to the Conservatoire!” I wanted to be a nun and this was considered absurd, idiotic, unreasonable. “Send her to the Conservatoire” had opened out a field for discussion, the horizon of the future. My uncle, Félix Faure, and Mlle. Brabender were the only ones against this idea. They tried in vain to make my mother understand that with the hundred thousand francs that my father had left me I might marry. But my mother had replied that I had declared I had a horror of marriage, and that I should wait until I was of age to go into a convent.