Claudine at School

by Colette

  We no longer paid the least attention to our alien competitors and they did not look at us either. The heat and our jangled nerves had taken away all desire to show off and all animosity. The girls from Villeneuve School, the ‘apple-greens’ as we called them – because of the green ribbons round their necks, that appalling harsh green which is the special prerogative of boarding-schools – still put on prudish, disgusted airs when they came anywhere near us (why? we shall never know); but everyone was settling down and relaxing. Already we were thinking about our departure tomorrow morning and brooding deliciously on how we’d rile our rejected schoolmates, the ones who hadn’t been able to enter on account of ‘general weakness’. How the gawky Anaïs was going to preen and strut and talk about the Training College as if she owned it! Pooh! I hadn’t enough shoulders to shrug.

  The examiners reappeared at least; they were mopping their faces and looked ugly and shiny. Heavens, I should hate to be married in weather like this! The mere idea of sleeping with a man who was as hot as they were … (In any case, in summer, I should have two beds …) Moreover, the smell in that overheated room was appalling; it was obvious that a great many of those little girls were anything but fastidious about their underclothes. I would have done anything to get away.

  I collapsed on a chair and vaguely listened to the others as I awaited my turn; I saw the girl, the luckiest one of all, who had ‘finished’ first. She had endured all the questioning; now she could breathe again as she crossed the room to the accompaniment of compliments, envious glances and cries of ‘You’re jolly lucky!’ Soon another one followed her and joined her in the playground where the ‘released’ were resting and exchanging their impressions.

  Old Sallé, slightly unbent by this sun which warmed his gout and his rheumatics, was taking a forced rest as the girl he was waiting for was occupied elsewhere. Suppose I risked a tentative assault on his virtue? Very quietly, I went up and sat down on the chair opposite him.

  ‘Good morning, Monsieur Sallé.’

  He stared at me, settled his glasses, blinked – and still did not recognize me.

  ‘Claudine, you know?’

  ‘Ah … fancy that! Good morning, my dear child! Is your father well?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  ‘Well now, how’s the exam going? Are you satisfied? Will you soon be finished?’

  ‘Alas, I’d like to be! But I’ve still got to get through physics and chemistry, literature – which is your department – English and music. Is Madame Sallé well?’

  ‘My wife’s gadding about in Poitou; she’d do much better to be looking after me but …’

  ‘Listen, Monsieur Sallé, now you’ve got me here, do get me over the literature.’

  ‘But I haven’t got to your name, not nearly! Come back a little later on …’

  ‘Monsieur Sallé, whatever would it matter?’

  ‘Matter? It would matter that I was enjoying a moment’s respite and that I had thoroughly deserved it. And besides, it’s not in the programme; we mustn’t break the alphabetical order.’

  ‘Monsieur Sallé, be a dear. You need hardly ask me anything. You know that I know much more than the syllabus demands about books that count as literature. I’m a bookworm in Papa’s library.’

  ‘Er … yes, that’s true. I can certainly do that for you. I had intended to ask you what were the bards and the troubadours and the Roman de la rose, and so on.’

  ‘You can set your mind at rest, Monsieur Sallé. The troubadours, I know all about them. I always see them in the poem of the little Florentine Singer, like this …’

  I stood up and struck the pose; my body leaning forward on the right leg and old Sallé’s green umbrella doing duty as a mandoline. Luckily we were quite alone in that corner! Luce stared at me from the distance and gaped with surprise. Poor gouty old man, it amused him a little and he laughed.

  ‘And they wore a velvet cap and curly hair, very often even a piebald costume (in blue and yellow, it looks particularly well); their mandoline hung on a silken cord and they sang that little thing out of the Passer-By: “My sweet one, April’s here.” That, Monsieur Sallé, is how I see the troubadours. We have also the First Empire troubador.’

  ‘My child, you’re a little crazy but I find you refreshing. Just Heaven! What on earth can you possibly call troubadors of the First Empire? Speak very low, my little Claudine – if their Lordships saw us …’

  ‘Ssh. The First Empire troubadors, I knew all about them from the songs Papa used to sing. Listen carefully.’

  I hummed very softly:

  ‘Burning with love, setting forth to the wars,

  His helm on his head and his lyre in his hand,

  A troubador sings to the maid he adores,

  Looking his last on his dear native land:

  “My country, she calls me,

  My sweetheart enthrals me,

  For love and for glory, I’d gladly be slain,

  Such is the troubador’s merry refrain.”’

  Old Sallé roared with laughter:

  ‘Good Lord, how absurd those people were! Of course I know we shall be just as absurd in twenty years’ time, but that idea of a troubador with a helmet and a lyre! … Run away quick, child, you’ll get a good mark; kind regards to your father, tell him I’m devoted to him and that he teaches his daughter fine songs!’

  ‘Thank you, Monsieur Sallé, good-bye. Thank you again for not asking me any questions. I won’t say a word – don’t worry!’

  What a thoroughly nice man! This had slightly restored my courage and I looked so cheerful that Luce asked me:

  ‘Did you answer well, then? What did he ask you? Why did you take his umbrella?’

  ‘Ah! I’ll tell you! He asked me very difficult things about the troubadors, about the shape of the instruments they used; luckily I happened to know all those details!’

  ‘The shape of the instruments … no, honest, I shudder at the thought he might have asked me that! The shape of the … but it’s not in the syllabus! I shall tell Mademoiselle!’

  ‘Right, we’ll make a formal complaint. Have you finished?’

  ‘Yes, thanks! I’ve finished. I’ve got a hundred pounds weight off my chest, I assure you! I think there’s only Marie left to go through it now.’

  ‘Mademoiselle Claudine!’ said a voice behind us. Aha! It was Roubaud. I sat down in front of him, decorous and reserved. He assumed a pleasant manner – he is the most polished of the local professors – and I talked back, but he still had a grudge against me, vindictive creature, for having too hastily brushed aside his Botticellian compliment. It was in a slightly peevish voice that he asked me:

  ‘You haven’t fallen asleep under the leaves today, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘Is that a question that forms part of the programme Monsieur?’

  He gave a slight cough. I had made a shocking blunder to vex him. Well, it couldn’t be helped:

  ‘Kindly tell me how you would set about procuring yourself ink.’

  ‘Good heavens, Sir, there are lots of ways: the simplest would be just to go and ask for some at the stationer’s on the corner …’

  ‘A pleasant joke, but not enough to obtain you lavish marks … Will you try and tell me what ingredients you would use to fabricate ink?’

  ‘Nut gall … tannin … iron monoxide … gum …’

  ‘You don’t know the proportions?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity! Can you tell me something about mica?’

  ‘I’ve never seen it anywhere except in the little panes in the doors of stoves.’

  ‘Really? Once more, a pity! The lead in pencils, what is it made of?’

  ‘Graphite, a soft stone that is cut into thin rods and enclosed between two halves of a wooden cylinder.’

  ‘Is that the only use of graphite?’

  ‘I don’t know any others.’

  ‘As usual, what a pity! Only pencils are made with it?’

  ‘Yes, but a great many a
re made; there are some mines in Russia, I think. People consume a fabulous quantity throughout the entire world, especially examiners who sketch portraits of candidates in their notebooks …’

  (He blushed and fidgeted.)

  ‘We will pass on to English.’

  Opening a little collection of Miss Edgeworth’s Tales, he said:

  ‘Please translate a few sentences for me.’

  ‘Translate, yes, but read … that’s another matter!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because our English mistress pronounces it in a ridiculous way. And I don’t know how to pronounce it otherwise.’

  ‘Pooh! What does that matter?’

  ‘It matters that I don’t like making a fool of myself.’

  ‘Read a little, I’ll pull you up at once.’

  I read but in a very low voice, hardly articulating the syllables and I translated the sentences before I had uttered the last words. Roubaud burst out laughing, in spite of himself, at such eagerness not to display my deficiency in English and I felt like scratching his face. As if it were my fault!

  ‘Good. Will you give me some instances of irregular verbs, with their form in the present tense and in the past participle?’

  ‘To see, I saw, seen. To be, I was, been. To drink, I drank, drunk. To …’

  ‘That’s enough, thank you, Good luck, Mademoiselle.’

  ‘Too kind of you, Sir.’

  I discovered the next day that that hypocrite had given me extremely bad marks, three below the average, so that I would have been ploughed if my marks for written work, especially for French Composition, hadn’t pleaded in my favour. Beware of these underhand men in pretentious neckties who stroke their moustaches and pencil your portrait while giving you surreptitious looks! It was true that I had annoyed him, but the fact remains that straightforward bulldogs like old Lacroix are worth a hundred of him!

  Delivered from physics and chemistry as well as English, I sat down and busied myself with making my disordered hair look slightly more artistic. Luce made a bee-line for me and obligingly rolled my curls round her finger, kittenish and cuddling as usual! She certainly had courage, in a temperature like that!

  ‘Where are the others, baby?’

  ‘The others? Oh, they’ve all finished, they’re down in the playground with Mademoiselle. And all the girls from the other schools who’ve finished are down there too.’

  The room was, in fact, rapidly emptying.

  That fat, kind Mademoiselle Michelot summoned me at last. She was red and exhausted enough to make Anaïs herself feel sorry for her. I sat down; she studied me with big, puzzled, good-natured eyes, without saying a word.

  ‘You are … musical, Mademoiselle Sergent told me.’

  ‘Yes, Mademoiselle, I play the piano.’

  She threw up her arms and exclaimed:

  ‘Then you know much more about it than I do.’

  It was a cry from the heart; I couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘Dear me, now! Listen … I’m going to make you read at sight and that’ll be all. I’ll find you something difficult, you’ll get through it without any trouble.’

  The ‘something difficult’ she found was a fairly simple exercise which, being all in semiquavers, with seven flats in the key-signature, had seemed to her ‘black’ and redoubtable. I sang it allegro vivace, surrounded by a circle of admiring little girls who sighed with envy. Mademoiselle Michelot nodded her head, and, without further insistence, awarded me a 20 which made the audience turn green.

  Ouf! So it was actually over! Soon I would be back in Montigny; I would return to school, run about the woods, watch the frolics of our instructresses (poor little Aimée, she must be languishing, all by herself!). I tore down to the playground; Mademoiselle Sergent was only waiting for me and stood up as soon as she saw me.

  ‘Well! Is it all over?’

  ‘Yes, thank the Lord! I’ve got twenty for music.’

  ‘Twenty for music!’.

  My companions shouted the words in chorus, unable to believe their ears.

  ‘It only needed that – that you should not have got twenty for music,’ said Mademoiselle, with an air of detachment, but secretly flattered.

  ‘All the same,’ said Anaïs, annoyed and jealous, ‘twenty for music, nineteen for French Composition … if you’ve got a lot of marks like those!’

  ‘Don’t worry, sweet child, the elegant Roubaud will have marked me extremely stingily!’

  ‘Because?’ inquired Mademoiselle, promptly uneasy.

  ‘Because I didn’t have much to say to him. He asked me what wood they made flutes out of, no, pencils, something of that sort, and then something or other about ink … and about Botticelli … Quite frankly, the two of us didn’t “click”.’

  The Headmistress’s brow darkened again.

  ‘I should have been extremely surprised if you hadn’t done something idiotic! You’ll have no one but yourself to blame if you fail.’

  ‘Alas, who knows? I shall blame it on Monsieur Antonin Rabastens – he has inspired me with a violent passion and my studies have suffered deplorably as a result.’

  At this, Marie Belhomme clasped her midwife’s hands and declared that, if she had a lover, she would not say it so brazenly. Anaïs looked at me out of the corner of her eye to find out if I were joking or not, and Mademoiselle, shrugging her shoulders, took us back to the hotel, lagging and dropping behind and dawdling so much that she invariably had to wait for someone at every turning. We had dinner; we yawned. At nine o’clock we were smitten again with the fever of going to read the names of the elect on the gates of that ugly Paradise. ‘I shan’t take any of you,’ declared Mademoiselle, ‘I shall go alone and you will wait here.’ But there arose a concert of groans that she relented and let us come.

  Once again we took candles as a precaution, but this time they were not needed; a benevolent hand had hung a big lantern over the white notice on which our names were inscribed … there, I’m going a little too fast in saying ‘our’ … suppose mine wasn’t to be found in the list? Anaïs would have fainted from joy! Luckily in the midst of exclamations, shoves from behind and much clapping of hands, I read out: Anaïs, Claudine, etc … All of us, in fact! Alas, no, not Marie: ‘Marie’s failed,’ murmured Luce. ‘Marie’s not on it,’ whispered Anaïs, hiding her malicious delight with considerable difficulty.

  Poor Marie Belhomme remained rooted to the spot, her face quite white, in front of the cruel sheet which she studied with her glittering, birdlike eyes huge and round: then the corners of her mouth pulled down and she burst into noisy tears … Mademoiselle took her away, annoyed; we followed, without giving a thought to the passers-by who looked back. Marie was moaning and sobbing out loud.

  ‘Come, come, little girl,’ said Mademoiselle. ‘You’re being unreasonable. You can try again in October, you’ll have better luck … Why think, that gives you two more months to work in …’

  ‘Oh, oh!’ wailed the other, inconsolable.

  ‘You’ll pass, I tell you! Look, I promise you that you’ll pass! Now are you satisfied?’

  This affirmation did, indeed, have a happy result. Marie no longer did more than give little grunts, like a month-old puppy when you stop it from sucking the teat, and walked along dabbing her eyes.

  Her handkerchief was wringing wet and she ingenuously wrung it out as we walked over the bridge. That bitch of an Anaïs said in an undertone: ‘The papers announce a high rise in the river Lisse.’ Marie, who had heard, burst into uncontrollable laughter mixed with the remains of sobs, and we all laughed wildly too. And, in a flash, the unstable head of the ploughed candidate had veered round to joy, like a weathercock; she thought how she was going to pass in October and became positively gay. And nothing seemed more appropriate to us, that heavy, sultry night, than to take a skipping-rope and skip and skip in the square (all of us, yes, even the Jauberts!) up till ten o’clock under the moon.

  The next morning, Mademoiselle had already come roun
d and shaken us in our beds at six o’clock, though the train didn’t leave till ten! ‘Get up, get up, you little ticks; you’ve got to pack your things and have your breakfast; you’ll have none too much time!’ She was throbbing with violent trepidation, her sharp eyes gleamed and sparkled; she hustled Luce who was staggering with sleep and pommelled Marie Belhomme who, in her nightdress and slippers, was rubbing her eyes without regaining any clear consciousness of the everyday world. We were all utterly exhausted but who would have recognized in Mademoiselle the duenna who had chaperoned us these last three days? Happiness transfigured her; she was going to see her little Aimée again. From sheer joy, she kept smiling beatifically at nothing in the omnibus that took us back to the station. Marie seemed a little melancholy about her failure, but I think it was only out of duty that she put on a contrite expression. And we chattered wildly, all at once, each one telling the story of her exam to five others who were not listening.

  ‘Old thing!’ screeched Anaïs. ‘When I heard that he was asking me the dates of the …’

  ‘I’ve forbidden you a hundred times to call each other “old thing”,’ broke in Mademoiselle.

  ‘Old thing,’ went on Anaïs under her breath, ‘I only just had time to open my little notebook in my hand; the most terrific thing is that he saw it – cross my heart he did – and he didn’t say a word!’

  ‘Oh, you liar of liars!’ cried the honest Marie Belhomme, her eyes starting out of her head. ‘I was there, I was watching, he didn’t see anything at all – he’d have taken it away from you … they certainly took the ruler away from one of the Villeneuve girls …’

  ‘You’d better keep your mouth shut! Or run along and tell Roubaud that the Dog’s Grotto is full of sulphuric acid!’

  Marie hung her head, turned red and began to cry again at the remembrance of her misfortunes. I made the gesture of opening an umbrella and Mademoiselle once more emerged from her ‘delicious anticipation’:

  ‘Anaïs, you’re a pest! If you torment one single one of your companions, I’ll make you travel alone in a separate compartment.’