Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the
happiness that should have followed this love not
having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken.
And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in
life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that
had seemed to her so beautiful in books.
She had read “Paul and Virginia,” and
she had dreamed of the little bamboo-house, the nigger
Domingo, the dog Fiddle, 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.
