Filet by Charlotte Brontë Red by Stephanie Poppins Music by John Myles Carter Chapter Nine Isidor My time was now well and profitably filled up.
What with teaching others and studying closely myself,
I had hardly a spare moment.
It was pleasant.
I felt I was getting on,
Not lying the stagnant prey of mould and rust,
But polishing my faculties and wetting them to a keen edge with constant use.
Experience of a certain kind lay before me,
On no narrow scale.
Filet is a cosmopolitan city,
And in this school were girls of almost every European nation and likewise a very varied rank in life.
Equality is much practised in the Bassacourt,
Though not republican in form,
It is nearly so in substance,
And at the desks of Madame Beck's establishment,
The young countess and the young bourgeoisie sat side by side.
Nor could you always by outward indications decide which was noble and which plebeian,
Except that indeed the latter had often franker and more courteous manners,
While the former bore away the bell for a delicately balanced combination of insolence and deceit.
In the former there was often quick French blood mixed with a marsh phlegm.
I regret to say the effect of this vivacious fluid chiefly appeared in the oilier glibness with which flattery and fiction ran from the tongue,
And in a manner lighter and livelier,
But quite heartless and insincere.
To all parties justice,
The honest of aboriginal Le Bassacourtiens had a hypocrisy of their own,
But it was of a coarse order,
Such as could deceive few.
Whenever a lie was necessary for their occasions,
They brought it out with a careless ease and breadth,
Altogether untroubled by the rebuke of conscience.
Not a soul in Madame Beck's house,
From the scullion to the directness herself,
Was above being ashamed of a lie.
They thought nothing of it.
To invent might not be precisely a virtue,
But it was the most venial of faults.
J'ai menté plusieurs fois,
Formed an item of every girl's and woman's monthly confession.
The priest heard unshocked and absolved unreluctant.
If they had missed going to Mass or read a chapter of a novel,
That was another thing entirely.
These were crimes whereof rebuke and penance were the unfailing weed.
While yet but half-conscious of this state of things,
And unlearned in its results,
I got on in my new sphere very well.
After the first few difficult lessons,
Given amidst peril and on the edge of a moral volcano that rumbled under my feet and sent sparks and hot fumes into my eyes,
The eruptive spirit seemed to subside as far as I was concerned.
My mind was a good deal bent on success.
I could not bear the thought of being baffled by mere undisciplined disaffection and wanton indecility in this first attempt to get on in life.
Many hours of the night I used to lie awake,
Thinking what plan I had best adopt to get to a reliable hold on these mutineers,
To bring this stiff-necked tribe under permanent influence.
In the first place,
I saw plainly that aid in no shape was to be expected from Madame.
Her righteous plan was to maintain an unbroken popularity with the pupils at any and every cost of justice or comfort to the teachers.
For a teacher to seek her reliance in any crisis of insubordination was equivalent to securing her own expulsion.
In intercourse with her pupils,
Madame only taught to herself what was pleasant,
Amiable and recommendatory,
Rigidly requiring of her lieutenants sufficiency for every annoying crisis where to act with adequate promptitude was to be unpopular.
Thus I must look only to myself.
In primis,
It was as clear as the day that this swinish multitude were not to be driven by force.
They were to be humoured,
Borne with very patiently.
A courteous,
Though sedate manner impressed them,
A very rare flash of railway did good.
Severe or continuous mental application they could not or would not bear.
Heavy demand on the memory,
The reason,
The attention,
They rejected point blank.
Where a girl of not more than average capacity and docility would quietly take a theme and bind herself to the task of comprehension in England,
A La Basse-Corienne would laugh in your face and throw it back to you with the phrase Dieu,
Que c'est difficile,
Je n'en veux pas.
C'est l'émanuito.
A teacher who understood her business would take it back at once without hesitation,
Contest or expostulation,
Proceed with even exaggerated care to smooth every difficulty,
To reduce it to the level of their understandings,
Return it to them thus modified and lay on the lash of sarcasm with unsparing hand.
They would feel the sting,
Perhaps wince a little under it,
But they bore no malice against this sort of attack,
Provided the sneer was not sour but hearty and that it held up well to them in a clear,
Light and bold type,
So that she who ran might read their incapacity,
Ignorance and sloth.
They would write for three additional lines to a lesson,
But I never knew them rebel against a wound given to their self-respect.
The little they had of that quality was trained to be crushed and it rather liked the pressure of a firm heel than otherwise.
By degrees,
As I acquired fluency and freedom in their language and could make such application of its more nervous idioms as suited their case,
The elder and more intelligent girls began to rather like me in their way.
I noticed that whenever a pupil had been roused to feel in her soul the stirring of worthy emulation or the quickening of honest shame,
From that date she was one.
If I could but once make their ears burn under their thick,
Glossy hair,
All was comparatively well.
By and by bouquets began to be laid on my desk in the morning.
By way of acknowledgement for this little foreign attention,
I used sometimes to walk with a few select pupils during recreation.
In the course of conversation it fell once or twice I made an unpremeditated attempt to rectify some of their distorted notions of principle.
Especially I expressed my ideas of the evil and baseness of a lie.
In an unguarded moment I chanced to say of the two errors I considered falsehood worse than occasional lapse in church attendance.
The poor girls were tutored to report in Catholic ears whatever the Protestant teacher said.
An edifying consequence ensued.
Something,
An unseen and indefinite and nameless something,
Stole between myself and these,
My best pupils.
The bouquets continued to be offered,
But conversation thenceforth became impracticable.
As I paced the alleys or sat in the bureau,
A girl never came to my right hand but a teacher,
As if by magic,
Appeared at my left.
Also,
Wonderful to relate,
Madame's shoes of silence brought her continually to my back,
As quick,
As noiseless and unexpected as some wandering zephyr.
The opinion of my Catholic acquaintance concerning my spiritual prospects was somewhat naively expressed to me on one occasion.
A pensionaire,
To whom I had rendered some little service,
Exclaimed one day as she sat beside me,
Madame Zell,
What a pity you are a Protestant.
Why,
Isabelle?
Which meant,
When you die you will go to hell.
Isabelle was an odd blunt little creature.
I laughed,
As indeed it was impossible to do otherwise.
Has the reader forgotten Miss Fanshaw?
If so,
I must be allowed to reintroduce that young lady as a thriving pupil of Madame Beck's.
On her arrival in the Rue Faucette,
Two or three days after my sudden settlement there,
She encountered me with very little surprise.
She must have had good blood in her veins,
For never was any Duchess more perfectly,
Radically,
Unaffectedly nonchalant than she.
A weak,
Transient amaze was all she knew of the sensation of wonder.
Most of her other faculty seemed to be in the same flimsy condition.
Her liking and disliking,
Her love and hate,
Were mere cobweb and gossamer.
But she had one thing about her that seemed strong and durable enough,
And that was her selfishness.
She was not proud as I was.
She would forthwith have made of me a sort of friend.
She'd tease me with a thousand vapid complaints about school quarrels and household economy.
The cookery was not to her taste.
The people about her,
Teachers and pupils,
She held to be despicable because they were foreigners.
I bore with her abuse of the Friday's salt fish and hard eggs,
With her invective against the soup,
The bread,
The coffee,
With some patience for a time.
But at last,
Wearied by iteration,
I turned crusty and put her to rights.
A thing I ought to have done in the very beginning,
For a salutary setting down always agreed with her.
Much longer had I to endure her demands on me in the way of work.
Her wardrobe,
So far as I was concerned,
Articles of external wear,
Was well and eloquently supplied,
But there were other habiliments not so carefully provided.
What she had needed frequent repair.
She hated needle drudgery herself and would bring her hose etc.
To me in heaps to be mended.
Notwithstanding these foibles and various other needless to mention,
How pretty she was,
How charming she looked when she came down on a sunny Sunday morning,
Well-dressed and well-humoured,
Robed in pale lilac silk and with her fair long curls reposing on her white shoulders.
Sunday was a holiday which she always passed with friends resident in town and amongst these friends she speedily gave me to understand was one who would feign becoming something more.
By glimpses and hints it was shown me and by the general buoyancy of her look and manner Elong provided that ardent admiration,
Perhaps genuine love,
Was at her command.
She called her Souter Isidore.
This,
However,
She intimated was not his real name but one by which it pleased her to baptise him.
His own,
She hinted,
Not being very pretty.
Once,
When she had been bragging about the vehemence of Isidore's attachments I asked if she loved him in return.
He is handsome,
Said she,
And he loves me to distraction so that I am well amused.
Suss of it!
I one day took it upon me to make serious inquiries as to whether the gentleman was such as her parents and especially her uncle,
On whom it appeared she was dependent would be likely to approve.
She allowed this was very doubtful as she did not believe Isidore had much money.
Do you encourage him?
I asked.
There is more sometimes,
She said.
Without being certain you will be permitted to marry him.
Oh,
How doubtish you are!
I don't want to be married.
I am too young.
But if he loves you as much as you say and yet it comes to nothing in the end,
He will be made miserable.
Of course it will break his heart.
I should be shocked and disappointed if it didn't.
I wonder whether this Monsieur Isidore is a fool,
Said I.
He is about me but he is wise in other things.
He is considered among others as extremely clever.
All I know is that he does little more than sigh in my presence and I can wind him round my little finger.
And indeed she did.
Gifts came for her,
Gloves,
Bouquets,
Even trinkets and these things contrary to her custom and even nature for she was not secretive when most sedulously kept out of sight for a time.
But one evening when she was going to a large party for which particular care and elegance of costume were demanded she could not resist coming to my chamber to show herself in all her splendour.
Beautiful she looked,
So young,
Fresh and with a delicacy of skin and flexibility of shape altogether English and not found in the list of continental female charms.
Her dress was new,
Costly and perfect.
I saw at a glance it lacked none of those finishing details which cost so much and give to the general effect such an air of tasteful completeness.
Her eyes sparkled gleefully.
She was going to bestow on me a kiss in her schoolgirl fashion of showing her delights but I said,
Let us be steady and know what we are about and find out the meaning of our magnificence.
The brooch,
The earrings,
The bracelet,
No one in school has such a set not madame herself,
Said she.
I see them all,
Said I.
My uncle knows nothing about them.
Were they presents from Mrs Chaudemondelet?
No,
Mrs Chaudemondelet is a mean,
Stingy creature.
She never gives me anything now.
I did not choose to ask any further questions but turned abruptly away.
Then she said,
I assure you nothing remains unpaid for but the few dresses I have lately had,
All the rest is settled.
I suppose I am to understand that Monsieur Isidore is the benefactor.
I said,
It is from him you have accepted that costly parure that he supplies you bouquets and your gloves.
You express yourself so disagreeably,
Said she.
One hardly knows how to answer.
What I mean to say is,
I occasionally allow Isidore the pleasure and honour of expressing his homage by the offer of a trifle.
That comes to the same thing,
Said I.
I danced with the young officer the other night,
Whom I love a thousand times more than Isidore.
I often wonder why I feel so very cold to him for everyone says he's handsome and other ladies admire him but somehow he bores me.
Let me now see how it is.
She seemed to make an effort to reflect and in this I encouraged her.
Yes,
I said,
Try to get a clear idea of the state of your mind.
To me it seems in a great mess.
Chaotic as a ragbag.
It is something in this fashion,
She cried out here long.
The man is too romantic and devoted.
He expects something more of me than I find it convenient to be.
He thinks I am perfect,
Furnished with all sorts of sterling qualities and solid virtues such as I never had and nor intend to have.
Now one can't help in his presence rather trying to justify his good opinion and it does so tire one to be goody and talk sense for he really thinks I am sensible.
I far more am at my ease with you,
Old lady,
Who take me at my lowest and know me to be coquettish and ignorant and flirting and fickle.
That is all very well,
I said,
Making a strenuous effort to preserve that gravity and severity which ran the risk of being shaken by this whimsical candour,
But it does not alter that wretched business of the presence.
Pack them up like a good honest girl and send them back.
Indeed I won't,
She said stoutly.
Then you are deceiving,
Monsieur Isidore.
It stands to reason that by accepting his presence you give him to understand he will one day receive an equivalent in your regard.
But he won't,
She interrupted.
He has his equivalent now in the pleasure of seeing me wear them.
He is only bourgeois.
This phrase in its senseless arrogance quite cured me of the temporary weakness which had made me relax my tone and aspect.
She rattled on.
My present business is to enjoy youth and not to think of fettering myself by promise or vow to this man or that.
When I first saw Isidore I believed he would help me enjoy it and I believed he would be content with my being a pretty girl and that we should meet and part and flutter about like two butterflies and be happy.
Lo and behold,
I find him at times to be as grave as a judge.
