She had read "Paul and Virginia," and she had dreamed of the little
bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all of the
sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for
you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand,
bringing you a bird's nest.
When she was thirteen, her father himself took her to town to place
her in the convent. They stopped at an inn in the St. Gervais quarter,
where, at their supper, they used painted plates that set forth the
story of Mademoiselle de la Valliere. The explanatory legends, chipped
here and there by the scratching of knives, all glorified religion, the
tendernesses of the heart, and the pomps of court.
Far from being bored at first at the convent, she took pleasure in the
society of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, took her to the chapel,
which one entered from the refectory by a long corridor. She played very
little during recreation hours, knew her catechism well, and it was she
who always answered Monsieur le Vicaire's difficult questions. Living
thus, without every leaving the warm atmosphere of the classrooms, and
amid these pale-faced women wearing rosaries with brass crosses, she
was softly lulled by the mystic languor exhaled in the perfumes of the
altar, the freshness of the holy water, and the lights of the tapers.
Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with
their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred
heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the
cross he carries. She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a
whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfil.
When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order that she
might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her hands joined,
her face against the grating beneath the whispering of the priest.
The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal
marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of
unexpected sweetness.
In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in
the study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or
the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the
"Genie du Christianisme," as a recreation. How she listened at first to
the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies reechoing
through the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the
shop-parlour of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened
her heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to
us only through translation in books. But she knew the country too well;
she knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the ploughs.