Child's imaginings; Convent girlhood; The sewing woman's lessons; Glimpses of romance; Ballads and keepsakes; A lost vocation; The coming of passion.

SHE had read 'Paul and Virginia', she had dreamed and dreamed of the little bamboo house, of Domingo the nigger, Fidelio the dog, and especially of some devoted little brother who runs off to find you nice red fruit in trees as high as church steeples, or races bare-foot along the sand with a bird's nest for you in his hand.

When she was thirteen, her father came up himself with her to Rouen to settle her in at the convent. They put up at an inn in the Saint-Gervais quarter. Their supper was served on coloured plates depicting the story of Mademoiselle de la Valliere. The wording underneath, which had been worn away in places by the knives and forks, spoke of the glories of religion, the delights of true love and the splendours of Court life.

So far from finding the convent dull in the early days, she loved being with the kind sisters, who, to keep her amused, took her into the chapel, reached through a long passage leading from the refectory. She went in but little for games, acquired a good knowledge of the catechism, and she it was who always answered the curate when any knotty question was propounded to the class. Living perpetually in the warm atmosphere of the classrooms, among these pale-faced women with their beads and crosses, she insensibly yielded to the mystic languor that exhales from the perfumes of the altar, the shadowy coolness of the holy-water stoups, and the soft radiance of the tapers. Instead of following the Mass, she pored upon the religious pictures in azure borders that adorned her prayer-book and she loved the sick lamb, the Sacred Heart pierced with spears, or poor Jesus falling by the wayside upon His cross. By way of mortifying the flesh she would try to go all day without food. And she ransacked her brains to think of some disciplinary obligation she could lay upon herself.

When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order to linger in the dim light, kneeling down with her hands clasped before her face, listening to the murmuring tones of the priest above her. Similes bringing in such words as 'betrothed', 'spouse', 'heavenly bridegroom', and 'eternal marriage', which occur again and again in sermons, awoke unsuspected sensations of pleasure in the hidden depths of her soul.

At night, before prayers, passages from a religious book would be read aloud in the schoolroom. On weekdays it would generally be some manual of Sacred History, or the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous; and on Sundays, as a treat, extracts from the 'Genie du Christianisme'. With what enchantment she listened, at first, to the sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholy borne on all the echoes of earth and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in a shop parlour in some busy street, she might have been susceptible to the poetic charms of nature, which, generally speaking, only reach us through the medium of books. But she knew only too much about the country; she was familiar with the lowing of cattle, she knew all about milking and ploughing. With eyes accustomed to look on the tranquil aspects of nature, she turned for contrast to the wild and precipitous. She only cared for the sea when it was lashed to fury by the storm, and for verdure when it served as a background to a ruin. Everything must needs minister to her personal longings, as it were, and she thrust aside as of no account whatever everything that did not immediately contribute to stir the emotions of her heart, for her temperament was sentimental rather than artistic, seeking, not pictures, but emotions.

There was a queer old maid at the convent who used to come for a week every month to see to the linen. Under archiepiscopal protection, as belonging to a family of gentlefolks that had been brought to ruin during the Revolution, she took her meals in the refectory with the sisters, and afterwards had a nice little gossip with them before going upstairs again to her work. Often the boarders would slip out of the schoolroom to go and see her. She knew by heart all the romantic ballads of the last generation, and sang them in a low voice while she was sewing. She would tell stories, retail the news, and do little odd jobs for you in the town. She always carried a novel of some sort or another in her pocket, which she would secretly lend to some of the big girls, and of which the worthy spinster herself would devour long passages in the intervals of her labours. It would be all about love, lovers, fair maidens, persecuted ladies swooning in lonely bowers, postilions murdered at every stage, horses ridden till they dropped dead, gloomy forests, sombre forebodings, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, skiffs gliding on moonlit waters, nightingales in bosky dells, noble gentlemen as brave as lions and as gentle as lambs, incredibly virtuous, always dressed in fine raiment and ready to weep like urns. For six months, Emma, when she was fifteen, battened on the garbage of these out-of-date 'Libraries of Choice Fiction'. Later on she came to read Walter Scott and got enthusiastic about historical things, forever dreaming of coffers, guardrooms and minstrels. She would have loved to dwell in some old manor, like those chatelaines with the long bodices who, beneath the trefoil window with its Gothic arch, spent their days with their elbow on the parapet and their chin in their hand, gazing far away into the distance for the coming of a cavalier with a white plume in his hat, galloping on a black charger. At that time she adored Mary Queen of Scots and evinced an enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or ill-fated women. Joan of Arc, Eloise, Agnes Sorel, la belle Ferronniere and Clemence Isaure shone out, in her eyes, like comets on the dark immensity of history, where there were still discernible here and there, but more deeply involved in shadow and quite disconnected one from another, Saint Louis and his oak, the dying Bayard, certain cruelties perpetrated by Louis XI, some fragmentary notions about Saint Bartholomew, the plumed hat of Henri IV, and, still as distinct as ever, the recollection of that pictorial dinner service on which the glorious days of King Louis XIV were held up to admiration.

In the music class, the songs she had to learn were all about little angels with golden pinions, madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers, compositions in which silly words and shoddy music did not avail to conceal the attractive phantasmagoria of their sentimental substratum. Some of her fellow pupils brought with them to the convent autograph albums they had had given them as New Year's presents. They had to be kept secret, and it was a terrible business to conceal them. The girls read them in the dormitory. Delicately handling their beautiful satin bindings, Emma gazed with wondering admiration on the names of the authors unknown to literary fame, mostly counts or viscounts, who had put their signatures to their contributions.

She felt a thrill as she tried to blow back the tissue paper which protected the pictures, and which rose in a curling fold at her breath and then fell back softly on the page. She saw behind the rail of a balcony a young man in a short cloak clasping in his arms a maiden in a white dress wearing an alms-bag in her girdle; or else portraits of anonymous English ladies with golden curls, who gazed at you with big bright eyes beneath their round straw hats. They were to be seen lolling in carriages, gliding through stately parks, with a greyhound bounding on before a team of trotting horses guided by a pair of diminutive postilions in white breeches. Others lay dreamily reclining on sofas, an open letter beside them, gazing at the moon through a half-open window partly veiled by a dark curtain. An innocent damsel, with a tear on her cheek, was seen giving food to a dove between the bars of a Gothic cage, or smiling, head on one side, as, with tapering fingers, she pulled off, one by one, the petals of a marguerite. And ye too were there, ye sultans with your long pipes, stretched drowsily in the shade of an arbour in the arms of Bayaderes, and Giaours, Turkish scimitars, Greek caps, and you, above all, pale landscapes of dithyrambic regions, which so often indulge us with a simultaneous display of palms and fir-trees, tigers on this side and lions on that, Tartar minarets on the horizon, Roman ruins in the foreground and kneeling camels in the middle distance- the whole within a framework of virgin forest very neatly trimmed, with a great perpendicular ray of sunlight trembling on the water, whereon, in patches of white on a steel-grey surface, swans are depicted proudly oaring their way far and near.

The shade of the argand lamp fixed in the wall above Emma's head illumined with its rays all these pictures of a romantic world which passed one by one before her eyes in the silence of the dormitory, a silence broken only by the distant sound of some belated fiacre rolling home along the boulevards.

At first, when her mother died, she wept bitterly. She had a memorial card made containing the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter which she wrote home to les Bertaux full of melancholy reflections on life, she begged that when her time came she herself might be laid in the same grave. The honest farmer thought she must be ill, and came post-haste to see her. Emma was inwardly gratified at the thought that she had risen at a bound to those ethereal heights which the more commonplace beings of the earth are never permitted to attain.

And so she suffered herself to glide along in these Lamartinian meanderings. She listened to the sound of harps upon the waters, the songs of dying swans, the sigh of falling leaves; she beheld spotless virgins mounting heavenwards, and heard the voice of the Eternal speaking in the valleys. And then it began to cloy: she wanted no more of it; but nevertheless went on from force of habit and afterwards from vanity, and was surprised in the end to find herself quite calm, with no more trace of sadness in her heart than of wrinkles on her brow.

The good nuns, who had felt so sure of her vocation, perceived with astonishment that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be slipping through their fingers. They had, in fact, lavished upon her so many offices, retreats, novenas and sermons, so thoroughly inculcated the respect due to the saints and martyrs, and given her so many good counsels regarding the modesty of her person and the welfare of her soul, that she did what horses do when you hold them in too tight. She pulled up short and jerked the bit from her mouth. Her mind, so material amidst its enthusiasm- she who had loved the church for its flowers, music for the words of its songs, and literature for its passionate excitements- rebelled against the mysteries of faith, even as she chafed against the restraint of discipline, a thing wholly repugnant to her disposition. When her father took her away from the school, the nuns saw her depart without regret. The Mother Superior was of opinion that of late her conduct had been lacking in reverence towards the Community.

On her return home, Emma found some distraction in managing the household, but she soon grew tired of the country and wished herself back in her convent. When Charles came to les Bertaux for the first time, she regarded herself as vastly disillusioned, one for whom life had nothing new to offer, either in knowledge or experience.

But her longing for a change; possibly, too, the unrest caused by a masculine presence, had sufficed to make her believe that she was at last possessed of that wonderful passion which, till then, had hovered like a great bird with roseate wings, floating in the splendour of poetic skies; and now she could not believe that her present unemotional state was the bliss whereof she had dreamed.

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