by Colette
The town was beginning to be as stirred-up as we were; just think, Monsieur Jean Dupuy was arriving in six days’ time! The boys went off in the morning in carts, singing at the top of their lungs and whipping the sorry steed in the shafts with all their might. They went out into the municipal wood – and into private woods too, I’m quite sure – to choose their trees and mark them; firs in particular, elms and velvety-leaved aspens would perish in hundreds; at all costs, honour must be done to this newly-made Minister! In the evening, in the square and on the pavements, the girls crumpled paper roses and sang to attract the boys to come and help them. Good heavens, how they must speed the task! I could see them from here, going at it with both hands!
Carpenters removed the mobile screens from the great room in the Town Hall where the banquet was to be held; a huge platform sprouted in the courtyard. The district Doctor-Superintendent Dutertre made brief and frequent appearances, approved everything that was being built, slapped the men on the back, chucked the women under the chin, stood drinks all round and disappeared, soon to return. Happy countryside! During this time, the woods were ravaged, poaching went on day and night, there were brawls in the taverns and a cow-girl at Chêne-Fendu gave her newborn child to the pigs to eat. (After a few days, they stopped the prosecution, Dutertre having succeeded in proving that the girl was not responsible for her actions … Already, no one bothered any more about the affair.) Thanks to these methods, he was poisoning the countryside but, out of a couple of hundred scoundrels, he had constituted himself a bodyguard who would murder and die for him. He would be made a Deputy. What else mattered!
As for us, good heavens! We made roses. Five or six thousand roses is no light matter. The little ones’ class was busy to the last child making garlands of pleated paper in pastel colours which would float all over the place at the whim of the breeze. Mademoiselle was afraid that these preparations would not be finished in time and gave us provisions of tissue paper and wire to take away every afternoon when school was over. We worked at home, after dinner, before dinner, without respite; the tables in all our houses were loaded with roses – white, blue, red, pink, and yellow ones – full-blown, crisp and fresh on the end of their stalks. They took up so much room that one didn’t know where to put them; they overflowed everywhere, blooming in multi-coloured heaps, and we carried them back in the morning in sheaves, looking as if we were going to wish relatives a happy birthday.
The Headmistress, bubbling over with ideas, also wants to construct a triumphal arch at the entrance to the Schools: the side-pillars are to be built up with pine-branches and dishevelled greenery, stuck with quantities of roses. The pediment is to bear this inscription, in letters of pink roses on a ground of moss:
WELCOME TO OUR VISITORS!
Charming, isn’t it?
I’ve had my inspiration too. I have suggested the idea of crowning the flag – meaning us three – with flowers.
‘Oh, yes,’ Anaïs and Marie Belhomme screeched delightedly.
‘That’s fixed then. (Hang the expense!) Anaïs, you’ll be crowned with poppies; Marie, you’ll be diademmed with cornflowers and, as for me, whiteness, candour, purity, I shall wear …’
‘What? Orange blossom?’
‘I’ve still a right to it, Miss! More than you have, no doubt!’
‘Do lilies seem immaculate enough to you?’
‘You make me sick! I shall choose marguerites; you know perfectly well the tricolour bouquet is made up of marguerites, poppies, and cornflowers. Let’s go down to the milliner’s.’
Looking disdainful and superior, we made our choice. The milliner took our head measurements and promised ‘the very best that could be made’.
The next day we received three wreaths which grieved me to the heart; diadems that bulged in the middle like the ones country brides wear; how on earth could one look pretty in that? Marie and Anaïs, enraptured, tried theirs on in the midst of an admiring circle of juniors; I said nothing, but I took my accessory home where I quietly took it to pieces. Then, on the same wire frame, I reconstructed a fragile, slender wreath with the big, starry marguerites placed as if by chance, ready to drop away; two or three flowers hung in bunches about my ears, a few trailed behind in my hair; then I tried my creation on my head. I’m only telling you that much! No danger of my letting the two others in on it!
An additional job has descended on us: the curl-papers! You don’t know, you couldn’t be expected to know. Learn then, that, at Montigny, a schoolgirl could not assist at a prizegiving, or at any solemnity, without being duly curled or waved. Nothing strange in that, certainly, although those stiff corkscrews and excessive twistings make the hair resemble teasled brooms more than anything else. But the Mammas of all these little girls, seamstresses, women market-gardeners, wives of labourers and shopkeepers have neither the time, nor the wish, nor the skill to put all those heads in curl-papers. Guess to whom this work, sometimes far from appetizing, reverts? To the teachers and to the pupils of the First Class! Yes, it’s crazy, but you see it’s the custom and that word is the answer to everything. A week before the prizegiving, juniors badger us and inscribe themselves on our lists. Five or six for each of us, at least! And for one clean head with pretty, supple hair, how many greasy manes – not to mention inhabited ones!
Today we began to put these creatures, ranging from eight to eleven years old, in curl-papers. Squatting on the ground, they abandoned their heads to us and, for curlers, we used pages from our old exercise-books. This year, I was only willing to accept four victims and chosen, moreover, among the clean ones; each of the other big girls was being hairdresser to six little ones! A far from easy job, since nearly all girls in the country round here possess great bushy manes. At midday, we summoned our docile flock: I began with a fair-haired little thing with fluffy hair that curled softly by nature.
‘Why, whatever are you doing here? With hair like that, you want me to frizz it in curl-papers? It would be a massacre!’
‘Fancy! But of course I want it curled for me! Not curled, on a Prizeday, on a day a Minister’s coming! Whoever heard of such a thing!’
‘You’ll be as ugly as the fourteen deadly sins! You’ll have stiff hair, sticking out all round your head like a scarecrow …’
‘I don’t care. At least I’ll be curled.’
Since she insisted! And to think that they all felt as she did; I was prepared to bet that Marie Belhomme herself …
‘I say, Marie, you who’ve got natural corkscrews, I’m sure you’ll stay as you are, won’t you?’
She screeched with indignation at the idea:
‘Me? Stay as I am? Don’t you think it! I’d arrive at the prizegiving with a flat head!’
‘But I’m not going to frizz myself.’
‘My dear, you curl tight enough. And besides your hair goes into a “cloud” quite easily … and besides everyone knows your ideas are never the same as everyone else’s.’
As she spoke she was vivaciously – too vivaciously – rolling the long locks, the colour of ripe wheat, of the little girl who was sitting in front of her, buried in her hair – a bush from which there occasionally issued shrill squeaks.
Anaïs, not without deliberate malice, was maltreating her patient, who was howling.
‘Well, she’s got that much hair, this one,’ she said, by way of excuse. ‘When you think you’ve finished, you’re only halfway. You wanted it – you’re here – try not to scream!’
We curled, we curled … the glass-paned corridor was filled with the rustle of the folded paper we twisted into the hair … Our work achieved, the juniors stood up with a sigh of relief and displayed heads bristling with wisps of paper on which one could still read: ‘Problems … morals … Duc de Richelieu …’ During the next four days they will go about the streets and the School, looking utter little frumps, without the least shame. But it’s the custom and that’s that … Our life had become completely disorganized. We were always out of doors, trotting hither and thit
her, carrying home or bringing back roses, begging – we four, Anaïs, Marie, Luce and I – requisitioning flowers, real ones this time, to decorate the banqueting-hall. Sent by Mademoiselle, who counted on our innocent young faces to disarm the conventional, we went into the houses of people we had never seen. It was thus we paid a visit to Paradis, the Registrar, because rumour accused him of being the possessor of dwarf rose-trees, little marvels. All shyness gone, we burst into his peaceful office with: ‘Good morning, Monsieur! We’ve been told you have some lovely rose-trees, it’s for the flower-stands in the banqueting-hall, you know, we’ve been sent by etc., etc.’ The poor man muttered something into his great beard and led us out, armed with a pair of secateurs. We departed with our arms loaded with pots of flowers, laughing, chattering, cheekily answering back the people who, at the entrance to each street, were all busy erecting the framework of triumphal arches. They called out to us: ‘Hi! You nice little pieces, there! Want someone to lend a hand? We’ll find you one, all right … Hoy! look out! There’s one just going to fall! You’re losing something, pick it up!’ Everyone knew each other; everyone addressed each other familiarly as tu …
Today and yesterday, the boys went off in the carts at dawn and did not come back till sunset, buried under branches of box, larch and arbor vitae, under cartloads of green moss that smelt of the bogs; afterwards they went off drinking, as usual. I have never seen these gangs of ruffians in such a state of excitement; normally they don’t care a fig about anything, even politics. Now they emerged from their woods, their hovels, from the bushes where they spied on the girls who looked after the cows, to embower Jean Dupuy! It was beyond all comprehension! Louchard’s gang, six or seven ne’er-do-wells who had pillaged the forests, went by, singing, invisible under heaps of ivy that trailed behind them, rustling softly.
The streets fought among themselves in rivalry; the Rue du Cloître erected three triumphal arches because the Grande-Rue had planned two, one at each end. But the Grande-Rue, put on its mettle, constructed a marvellous affair, a medieval castle, all in pine-branches trimmed even with shears, with pepper-pot turrets. The Rue des Fours-Barraux, just by the School, came under the rural-arty influence of Mademoiselle Sergent. It confined itself to covering the houses on either side with a complete tapestry of long-tressed, dishevelled branches and then putting battens across from each house to the one opposite and covering this roof with hanging masses of intertwining ivy. The result was a delicious arbour, dusky and green, in which voices were muted as if in a thickly-curtained room; people walked to and fro under it for sheer pleasure. Furious at this, the Rue du Cloître lost all restraint and linked its three triumphal arches together with clusters of mossy garlands stuck with flowers so as to have its arbour too. Whereupon, the Grande-Rue calmly set to and took up its pavements and erected, in their stead, a wood! Yes, honestly, a real little wood on either side with young trees that had been uprooted and replanted. It would only have needed a fortnight of this furious emulation for everyone to be cutting each other’s throats.
The masterpiece, the jewel, was our School – rather our Schools. When it was all finished, not a square inch of wall would be visible under the greenery, the flowers, and the flags. Mademoiselle had requisitioned an army of young men; the bigger boys and the assistant-masters, all of whom she directed with a rod of iron; they obeyed her without a murmur. The triumphal arch at the entrance had now seen the light of day; standing on ladders, the two mistresses and the four of us had spent three hours ‘writing’ in pink roses on the pediment:
WELCOME TO OUR VISITORS!
while the boys amused themselves by ogling our calves. From up above, from the roofs and windows and all the rough surfaces of the walls, there flowed and rippled such a cascade of branches, of red, white, and blue material, of ropes masked with ivy, of hanging greenery and trailing roses, that the huge building seemed to undulate from base to summit in the light wind and to be gently swaying. You entered the School by lifting a rustling curtain of flower-decked ivy and the fairy-like atmosphere continued inside. Ropes of roses outlined the corners, were festooned from wall to wall and hung at the windows: it was adorable.
In spite of our activity, in spite of our bold incursions on garden-owners, this morning we saw ourselves on the point of being short of flowers. General consternation! Curl-papered heads bent forward agitatedly around Mademoiselle who was brooding, with knitted brows.
‘All the same, I’ve got to have some!’ she exclaimed. ‘The whole stand on the left hasn’t any at all; we must have flowers in pots. You Rovers, come here at once!’
‘Here, Mademoiselle!’
We sprang up, all four of us (Anaïs, Marie, Luce, Claudine); we sprang forth from the buzzing throng, ready to dash away.
‘Listen. You’re to go and see old Caillavaut …’
‘Oh!!! …’
We hadn’t let her finish. You must realize that old Caillavaut is a miser, a regular Harpagon, slightly mad, spiteful as the plague and immensely rich. He owns a magnificent house and grounds which no one is allowed to enter but himself and his gardener. He is feared for being extremely malicious, hated for being a miser, and respected as a living mystery. And Mademoiselle wanted us to go and ask him for flowers! She couldn’t have realized what she was doing!
‘… Now, now, now! anyone would think I was sending off lambs to the slaughterhouse! You’ll soften his gardener’s heart and you won’t even see old Caillavaut himself. Anyway, what if you do? You’ve got legs to run away with, haven’t you? Off you go!’
I took the three others off, though they were far from enthusiastic, for I was conscious of a burning desire, tinged with vague apprehension, to penetrate into this old maniac’s domain. I urged them on: ‘Come on, Luce, come on, Anaïs! We’re going to see terrific things, we’ll be able to tell the others all about it … Why, they can be counted on the fingers of one hand, the people who’ve been inside old Caillavaut’s place!’
Confronted with the great green door, where flowering, over-scented acacias overhung the wall, no one dared to pull the bell-chain. Finally, I gave it a violent tug, thereby setting off a terrifying tocsin; Marie took three steps towards flight, and Luce, trembling, hid bravely behind me. Nothing happened; the door remained shut. A second attempt was equally unsuccessful. I then lifted the latch, which yielded, and, like mice, we crept in one by one, uneasily, leaving the door ajar. A great gravel courtyard, beautifully kept, lay in front of the fine white house whose shutters were closed against the sun; the courtyard expanded into a green garden, rendered deep and mysterious by its thick clumps of trees … Rooted to the spot, we stared without daring to move; still no one to be seen and not a sound. To the right of the house were greenhouses, closed and full of marvellous plants … The stone staircase widened out gently as it descended to the level of the gravel courtyard; on each step there were flaming geraniums, calceolarias with little tiger-striped bellies, dwarf rose-trees that had been forced into too much bloom.
The obvious absence of any owner restored my courage.
‘I say, are you coming or not? We’re not going to take root in the gardens of the Sleeping-Miser-in-the-Wood!’
‘Ssh!’ whispered Marie in terror.
‘What d’you mean, ssh? On the contrary, we must call out! Hi, over there! Monsieur Caillavaut! Gardener!’
No answer; all remained silence. I went over to the greenhouses, and, pressing my face against the panes, I tried to make out what was inside; a kind of dark emerald forest, dotted with splashes of brilliant colour that must certainly be exotic flowers …
The door was locked.
‘Let’s go,’ whispered Luce, ill at ease.
‘Let’s go,’ repeated Marie, even more anxious. ‘Suppose the old man jumped out from behind a tree!’
This idea made them flee towards the door; I called them back at the top of my voice.
‘Don’t be such dolts! You can see there isn’t anyone here. Listen … you’re each going to choose two or
three pots, the best ones on the stone steps. We’ll carry them off back there, without saying anything and I think we’ll have a huge success!’
They did not budge; definitely tempted, but nervous. I seized two clumps of ‘Venus’s slippers’, speckled like tit’s eggs, and I made a sign that I was waiting. Anaïs decided to imitate me and loaded herself with two double geraniums; Marie imitated Anaïs, Luce too, and we all four walked discreetly away. Near the door, absurd terror seized us again; we crowded each other like sheep in the narrow opening of the door and we ran all the way to the School where Mademoiselle welcomed us with cries of joy. All at once, we recounted our Odyssey. The Headmistress, startled, remained in perplexity for a moment, then concluded light-heartedly:
‘Well, well, we shall see! After all, it’s only a loan … a slightly forced one.’ We’ve never, never heard one mention of it since, but old Caillavaut has put up a bristling defence of spikes and broken tiles on his walls (this theft earned us a certain prestige; they’re connoisseurs in brigandage here). Our flowers were placed in the front row and then, goodness me!, in the whirlwind of the ministerial arrival, we completely forgot to return them; they now embellish Mademoiselle’s garden.
For a good long time now, this garden has been the one single subject of discord between Mademoiselle and that great fat woman, her mother. The latter, who has remained an out-and-out peasant, digs, weeds, tracks snails to their last retreats, and has no other ideal than to grow beds of cabbages, beds of leeks, beds of potatoes – enough to feed all the boarders without buying anything, in fact. Her daughter’s refined nature dreams of deep arbours, flowering shrubs, pergolas wreathed in honeysuckle – in short, of useless plants! As a result, one could alternately see Mother Sergent giving contemptuous hacks with her hoe at the little lacquer-trees and weeping birches and Mademoiselle stamping an irritated heel on the borders of sorrel and the odorous chives. This battle convulses us with joy. I must be just and also admit that, everywhere else except in the garden and in the kitchen, Madame Sergent effaces herself completely, never pays us a visit, never gives her opinion in discussions, and bravely wears her goffered peasant’s bonnet.
