Claudine at School

by Colette

  ‘The smoking compartment, naturally,’ I observed.

  ‘You were not being asked your opinion. Pick up your bags and wraps, don’t stand there like stuffed dummies!’

  Once in the train, she paid no more attention to us than if we did not exist; Luce went to sleep, with her head on my shoulder; the Jauberts became absorbed in the contemplation of the fields that slipped past and of the white and dappled sky; Anaïs bit her nails; Marie declined into a doze, along with her affliction.

  At Bresles, the last station before Montigny, we began to fidget a little; ten minutes more and we should be there. Mademoiselle pulled out her little pocket-mirror and verified the set of her hat, the disorder of her rough frizzy red hair, the cruel crimson of her lips. Absorbed and palpitating with excitement, her expression was almost demented. Anaïs pinched her cheeks in the wild hope of bringing a faint touch of red to them; I put on my immense, riotous hat. For whom we were taking so much pains? Not for Mademoiselle Aimée, certainly, in the case of us small fry … Oh, well! for no one, for the station officials, for the omnibus-driver, old Racalin, a sixty-year-old drunkard, for the half-wit who sold the papers, for the dogs who would be trotting along the road.

  There was the Fir Plantation, and the Bel Air Wood, and then the common, and the goods station; then, at long last, the brakes squeaked! We jumped out behind Mademoiselle who had already rushed to her little Aimée, who was hopping gaily about on the platform. She had crushed her in such a fierce embrace that the frail assistant-mistress had suddenly turned red, stifled by it. We ran up to her and welcomed her in the manner of good little schoolgirls: ‘… ’morning, Mmmselle! … H’are you, Mmmmselle?’

  As it was fine and we were in no hurry, we stuffed our suitcases into the omnibus and returned on foot, strolling the whole way between the high hedges where milkwort blossomed, blue and winey pink, and Ave Marias with their flowers like little white crosses. Happy to be off the leash, to have no French History to revise or maps to colour, we ran in front of and behind those ladies who walked arm in arm, close together and keeping in perfect step. Aimée had kissed her sister and given her a tap on the cheek, saying: ‘There, you see now, little canary-bird, one gets through somehow, in spite of everything!’ And, after that, she had only eyes and ears for her tall friend.

  Disappointed once again, poor Luce attached herself to my person and followed me like a shadow, muttering jeers and threats: ‘It’s truly worth while splitting one’s head to get compliments like that! … What a couple of guys those two look; my sister hanging on the other like a basket! … In front of all the people going by, it’s enough to make you weep!’ They couldn’t have cared less about the people going by.

  Triumphal return! Everyone knew not only where we came from but the results of the examination which Mademoiselle had telegraphed: people were standing in their doorways and made friendly signs to us … Marie felt her distress increasing and effaced herself as much as possible.

  The fact of having left the School for a few days made us see it more clearly on returning to it. It was finished, perfect to the last detail, white and spotless. The Town Hall stood in the middle, flanked by the two schools, boys’ and girls’; there lay the big playground, whose cedars they had mercifully spared, with its small, formal, typically French clumps of shrubs, and the heavy iron gates – far too heavy and too redoubtable – that shut us in. There stood the water-closets with six compartments, three for the big girls, three for the little ones (in a touching concession to modesty, the big girls’ lavatories had full doors and the little ones’ half-doors); upstairs were the handsome dormitories whose shining window-panes and white curtains were visible from outside. The unfortunate ratepayers would be paying for it for years to come. Anyone might think it was a barracks, it was so handsome!

  The girls gave us a noisy welcome. Since Mademoiselle Aimée had kindly confided the supervision of her own pupils and that of the First Class to the chlorotic Mademoiselle Griset during her little trip to the station, the classrooms were strewn with papers, and littered with sabots that had been used as missiles and the cores of wind-fallen apples … At a frown from Mademoiselle Sergent, everything was restored to order; creeping hands picked up the apple-cores and feet stretched out and silently resumed possession of the scattered sabots.

  My stomach was crying out and I went off to lunch, delighted to see Fanchette again, and the garden, and Papa; my white Fanchette, who had been baking herself and growing thinner in the sunshine, welcomed me with sharp, surprised mews; the green garden, neglected and overgrown with plants which had strained upward and grown immensely tall to find the sunlight the great trees hid from them; and Papa who welcomed me with a hearty, affectionate slap in the hollow under my shoulder:

  ‘What on earth’s become of you? I never see you these days!’

  ‘But, Papa, I’ve just come back from passing my exam.’

  ‘What exam?’

  I assure you there is no one like him! Obligingly, I recounted to him the adventures of the last few days, while he tugged his great red and white beard. He seemed pleased. No doubt, his experiments in cross-breeding slugs had furnished him with unhoped-for results.

  I allowed myself four or five days of rest and of wandering over to the Matignons where I found Clare, my co-First Communicant, dripping with tears because her lover had just left Montigny without even deigning to inform her. In a week she will possess another fiancé who will leave her at the end of three months; she is not cunning enough to hold the boys and not practical enough to get herself married. And, as she obstinately insists on remaining virtuous, this may go on for a long time.

  Meanwhile, she was looking after her twenty-five sheep, a slightly comic-opera, slightly absurd little shepherdess, with the big mushroom hat that protected her complexion and her chignon (the sun fades one’s hair, my dear!), her tiny blue apron embroidered in white, and the white novel, with its title En Fête! lettered in red, that she concealed in her basket. (It was I who had lent her the works of Auguste Germain to initiate her into Life! Alas, maybe I shall be responsible for all the appalling errors she’ll commit.) I was convinced that she found herself poetically unhappy – a pathetic, deserted fiancée – and that, when she was by herself, she delighted in assuming nostalgic poses, ‘her arms dropped, like useless weapons’, or her head bowed, half-buried under her dishevelled hair. While she was telling me the meagre news of the past four days, along with her misfortunes, it was I who kept an eye on the sheep and urged the bitch after them: ‘Fetch them, Lisette! Fetch them over there!’ and I who uttered the warning ‘Prrr … my beauty!’ to stop them from touching the oats: I’m used to it.

  ‘When I found out what train he was leaving by,’ sighed Claire, ‘I arranged to leave my sheep with Lisette and I went down to the level crossing. At the barrier, I waited for the train – it doesn’t go too fast there because it’s uphill. I saw him, I waved my handkerchief, I blew him kisses, I think he saw me … Listen, I’m not certain, but it looked to me as if his eyes were red. Perhaps his parents forced him to come back home … Perhaps he’ll write to me …’

  Keep it up, romantic little thing, hope costs nothing. If I tried to dissuade you, you wouldn’t believe me.

  After five days of loafing about the woods, scratching my arms and legs on brambles, bringing home armfuls of wild pinks, cornflowers and campions, and eating bitter wild cherries and gooseberries, curiosity seized me again and I felt a homesick longing for the School. So I went back to it again.

  I found them all – that is the big ones – sitting on benches in the shade, working lazily at ‘exhibition pieces’; the little ones, under the covered-in part, were in process of splashing each other at the pump; Mademoiselle was in a wicker armchair, her Aimée at her feet on an inverted flower-box, lounging and whispering. At my arrival, Mademoiselle Sergent started and swung round in her seat.

  ‘Ah, there you are! That’s lucky! You’ve certainly taken your time! Mademoiselle Claudine runs wil
d in the fields without giving a though to the fact that the prizegiving is approaching and that the pupils don’t know a note of the part-song they’re supposed to be singing at it!’

  ‘But … isn’t Mademoiselle Aimée a singing-teacher then? Isn’t Monsieur Rabastens (Antonin) one either?’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense! You know perfectly well that Mademoiselle Lanthenay can’t sing, her voice is too delicate to permit her to. As to Monsieur Rabastens, apparently they’ve been gossiping in the town about his visits and his singing-lessons. Good heavens, what a filthy hole this is for tittle-tattle! The long and short of it is, he won’t be coming back. We can’t do without you for the part-songs and you take advantage of the fact. This afternoon, at four o’clock, we will divide up the parts and you will copy out the verses on the blackboard.’

  ‘I’m perfectly willing. What’s the song this year?’

  ‘The Hymn to Nature. Marie, go and get it – it’s on my desk. Claudine is going to begin to din it into you.’

  It was a chorus in three parts, the typical kind of thing that schoolgirls sing. The sopranos twittered earnestly:

  ‘O’er the distant fields they ring,

  As the morning hymn they sing,

  Echoing sweetly to the sky …’

  Meanwhile, the mezzos, echoing the rhymes in ‘ing’, repeat ‘ding, ding, ding’ to imitate the Angelus bell. The audience would love it.

  So that delightful life was about to begin; a life consisting in shouting myself hoarse, in singing the same tune three hundred times over, in returning home voiceless, in losing my temper with those little girls who were congenitally lacking in the faintest sense of rhythm. If at least they gave me a present for doing all this!

  Anaïs, Luce, and a few others luckily had a good aural memory and, after the third repetition, could follow me with their voices. We stopped because Mademoiselle said: ‘Enough for today’ – it would have been too cruel to make us sing for long in that African temperature.

  ‘And, one other thing,’ added Mademoiselle. ‘It’s forbidden to hum the Hymn to Nature between lessons. Otherwise you’ll murder it, you’ll distort it out of all knowledge and you’ll be incapable of singing it properly at the prizegiving. Get on with your needlework now and don’t let me hear you talking too loud.’

  They kept us big ones out of doors so that we could execute in greater comfort the marvellous pieces of needlecraft destined for the exhibition of hand work! (Could these works be done in any way except ‘by hand’? I don’t know of any ‘foot work’.) For, after the distribution of prizes, the entire town would come and admire the display of our work. Two classrooms would be filled with samples of lace, tapestry, and beribboned lingerie laid out on the study-tables. The walls would be hung with open-work curtains, crochet bedspreads mounted on coloured linings, bedside rugs of green wool moss (in brushed-up knitting) dotted with imitation red and pink flowers, also in wool and with chimney-piece borders in embroidered plush … These grown-up little girls liked the underclothes they displayed to be glamorous, so their main exhibits consisted of sumptuous pieces of lingerie – batiste chemises embroidered with tiny flowers, with marvellous yokes; frilly drawers gartered with ribbons; camisoles scalloped top and bottom – all displayed over linings of red, blue, and mauve paper with labels on which the maker’s name was inscribed in beautiful round handwriting. All along the walls were ranged stools worked in cross-stitch on which reposed either the horrible cat whose eyes were made of four green stitches with a black one in the middle or the dog with the crimson back and the purplish paws, from whose mouth lolled a turkey-red tongue.

  Obviously it was the underclothes that principally interested the boys who came, like everyone else, to see the exhibition. They lingered over the flowered chemises and the beribboned knickers, nudged each other, laughed and whispered monstrous comments.

  It is only fair to say that the Boys’ School boasted its own exhibition, rivalling our own. If they did not offer exciting lingerie for public admiration, they displayed other marvels; cleverly-turned table-legs, twisted columns (my dear! they’re the most difficult of all), samples of woodwork in ‘dovetailing’, cardboard boxes dripping with glue, and, above all, clay models – the joy of the Headmaster who modestly christens this room ‘Sculpture Section’ – models which claim to reproduce the friezes of the Parthenon and other bas-reliefs but are all blurred, bloated and pitiable. The Drawing Section is no more consoling: the heads of the Brigands of the Abruzzi squint, the King of Rome has a boil, Nero grimaces horribly, and President Loubet in a tricolour frame (woodwork and paste-board combined) obviously wants to be sick (because he’s thinking about his minister, explains Dutertre, still furious at not being a Deputy). On the walls, grubby wash-drawings, architectural plans, and the ‘anticipated (sic) general view of the Exhibition of 1900’ – a water-colour which deserves the prize of honour.

  So, during the time that still separates us from the holidays, we shall leave all our books on the shelf, we shall work lazily in the shade of the walls, incessantly washing our hands – a pretext to go for a stroll – so as not to stain light wools and white fabrics – with damp fingers. All I am exhibiting is three pink lawn chemises, cut like a baby’s, with matching knickers – closed ones. This last detail scandalizes my companions who unanimously find it ‘indecent’ – on my word of honour!

  I installed myself between Luce and Anaïs who herself was sitting next to Marie Belhomme for, from force of habit, we keep together in a little group. Poor Marie! She had to work again for the exam in October … Since she was fretting to death in the classroom, Mademoiselle took pity on her and let her come with us; she sat there reading Atlases and Histories of France; when I say ‘reading’ – her book was open on her knees, she bent her head and glanced sideways in our direction, straining her ears to catch everything we said. I could foresee the result of the October exam!

  ‘I’m parched with thirst! Have you got your bottle?’ Anaïs asked me.

  ‘No, didn’t think of bringing it, but Marie’s sure to have hers.’

  Still another of our immutable, absurd customs, those bottles. As soon as the weather turned really hot, it was agreed that the water in the pump became undrinkable (it is at any season), and each one brought along a bottle of some cool drink at the bottom of her little basket – sometimes in her leather satchel or her canvas bag. There was great rivalry as to who could produce the most fantastic mixture and the most unnatural liquid. No cocoa, that was for the baby class! For us water mixed with vinegar which blanches the lips and gnaws at the stomach; acid lemonades; mint drinks, confected oneself with the fresh leaves of the plant; brandy, pinched from home and thickened with sugar; the astringent juice of green gooseberries that made one’s mouth water. The lanky Anaïs bitterly deplored the departure of the chemist’s daughter who at one time used to provide us with bottles of spirits of peppermint diluted with far too little water, or sometimes with a patent concoction called eau de Botot. I myself, being a simple nature, confined myself to drinking white wine with a dash of Seltzer water, sugar, and a little lemon. Anaïs indulged too freely in vinegar and Marie in extract of liquorice, so concentrated that it was almost black.

  As the use of bottles was forbidden, each one, I repeat, brought her own, stoppered with a cork through which was thrust a quill. This arrangement allowed us to drink by bending forward on the pretext of picking up a cotton-reel, without displacing the bottle lying in its basket, its beak sticking out. At the little quarter-of-an-hour recreation (at half past nine and half past three), everyone rushed to the pump to pour water over the bottles and cool them a little. Three years ago, a little girl fell down with her bottle and blinded herself in one eye; her eye is all white now. After this accident, they confiscated all the receptacles, every single one, for the space of a week … then someone brought hers back, an example followed by someone else the next day … and, a month later, the bottles were functioning regularly again. Perhaps Mademoiselle did not know of this
accident which happened long before her arrival – or else she preferred to shut her eyes so that we should leave her in peace.

  Nothing has been happening, to tell the truth. The heat has taken away all our high spirits. Luce besieges me less with her importune caresses; inclinations to quarrel hardly arise before they die down at once; it is general slackness, of course, and the sudden storms of July that catch us unawares in the playground and sweep us away under tremendous downpours of hail. An hour later, the sky is cloudless.

  We played a wicked joke on Marie Belhomme, who had boasted of coming to school without any drawers on, on account of the heat.

  There were four of us, one afternoon, sitting on a bench in the following order:

  Marie – Anaïs – Luce – Claudine.

  After having had my plan duly explained to them in undertones, my two neighbours got up to wash their hands and the middle of the bench remained empty, leaving Marie at one end and me at the other. She was half asleep over her arithmetic. I got up suddenly; the bench tipped over: Marie, startled awake, fell, her legs in the air, with one of those squawks like a slaughtered hen which are her personal speciality, and showed us … that she was, indeed, wearing no drawers. There was an outburst of howls and tremendous laughs; the Headmistress wanted to lecture us but could not, being in fits of laughter herself. Aimée Lanthenay preferred to take herself off so as not to present her pupils with the sight of herself writhing like a poisoned cat.

  Dutertre had not been here for ages. He was said to be at some bathing-resort where he was basking in the sun and flirting (but where did he get the money?). I could just see him in white flannels, wearing belts that were too broad and shoes that were too yellow; he adores those rather flashy get-ups. He would look very much of a flashy adventurer himself in those light colours – his face too sun-tanned and his eyes too bright – with his pointed teeth and his black moustache that has a rusty look as if it has been singed. I have never given another thought to his sudden attack in the glass-paned corridor; the impression had been sharp, but short – and besides, with him, one knows perfectly well that it means nothing! I am probably the three hundredth little girl he has tried to lure to his house; the incident is of no interest either to him or to me. It would have been if the attempt had succeeded, that’s all.