“C’est bien,” said Madame Beck,
when I came out of class, hot and a little exhausted.
“Ca ira.”
She had been listening and peeping through a spy-hole
the whole time.
From that day I ceased to be nursery governess, and
became English teacher. Madame raised my salary;
but she got thrice the work out of me she had extracted
from Mr. Wilson, at half the expense.
ISIDORE.
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
whetting them to a keen edge with constant use.
Experience of a certain kind lay before me, on no
narrow scale. Villette is a cosmopolitan city,
and in this school were girls of almost every European
nation, and likewise of very varied rank in life.
Equality is much practised in Labassecour; 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 bourgeoise 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 the marsh-phlegm: I regret to say that 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 do all parties justice, the honest aboriginal Labassecouriennes
had an hypocrisy of their own, too; 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 directress herself, but 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 menti 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: these were crimes
whereof rebuke and penance were the unfailing weed.
