Chapter 6. Schoolmistress in Paris

When I left the Haute-Marne to become a schoolmistress in Paris, I had to leave my mother and grandmother behind. Being separated from them made me suffer deeply, but I hadn’t yet given up the hope of making a happy future for them, and I held tightly to that illusion.

I became a teacher in Mme Vollier’s school at 14, rue du Chciteau- d’Eau in Montmartre. From the time I went to Paris until Mme Vollier died in my own school four years before the Siege, we never left each other. Her portrait is among my most precious souvenirs that my mother preserved carefully for me—half-faded portraits, worm-eaten books, bunches of yew and pine, and withered red carnations and white lilies. Today those souvenirs also include the white roses with drops of blood on the petals which I sent my mother from Clermont.

I see the pupils at the rue du Chateau-d’Eau again in groups. There were the seniors, two or three of whom were very tall—Leonie, Align, Leopoldine. There were the blonds, two of whom had wide foreheads and steel-blue eyes—H61oise and Gabrielle. There was a group of pale children: Josephine, little Noel, Marie. And others so brown they were black: Elisa, who had the sharp features of someone from the Midi; little Julie, whose voice was loud even though it wasn’t beautiful yet; Elisa, who played her little piece in a prize competition at a younger age than even Mozart had done. And so many more. What has become of them?

Julie joined me as a teacher at the school, and Mme Vollier was as affectionate as a mother. She even found ways to dress Julie and me stylishly. I remember hats made of white crepe with bouquets of daisies, a dress of black silk, and mantelets of lace. Pawn shops and secondhand stores helped, and we were fitted out for much less money than people would have believed.

While Julie and I were at Mme Vollier’s we always dressed alike and because both of us were tall and brunet, people used to think we were sisters. In 1871, when the police took down detailed information about me, I had to explain that misconception.

At this time, two of my cousins were also assistant schoolmistresses, one in the Puteaux suburb of Paris, the other at La Chapelle. We all had about the same income, the little that teaching earned in this period. That lack of money didn’t depress us, for we realized that this poor income would continue under the regime of His Majesty Napoleon III as it had under his predecessors. There is no profession in which people have less money, and no trade in which people know so well how to do without it. Some women of letters among our friends suffered far more. We were all a little bohemian, even Mme Vollier. As much as any woman who lives on her wages, and in spite of her age, she knew how to laugh at the situation.

We used to joke about our troubles when we gathered every Thursday evening and drank cups of steaming coffee. I kept from telling my mother that I had great difficulty making my income equal my expenditures, however restrained they were.

Recognizing that we wouldn’t earn anything from teaching, but not wishing to publicize that fact, Mme Vollier, Julie, and I drew up a formal partnership. I was able to send my mother the act of partnership, executed in good and proper form, which stopped people from saying things to her like: “Your daughter will never earn anything”; or, “She spends everything and you shouldn’t send her any more”; or, “A cook earns ten times more than your daughter does.” We knew quite well that teaching paid almost nothing, but any other trade open to women offered less fulfillment when money wasn’t the only objective. Are women’s professions any better today? Men’s aren’t.

My own dear mother found a way to send me a little money occasion¬ ally, which unhappily for my wardrobe I spent on books and music. Because of the act of partnership, she was entirely at ease about my financial position. The lamentations that imbeciles made about how wrong she had been in not forcing me to marry had ceased.

I continued to reject all thought of marriage. There are enough tortured women in the world without my becoming another one. True, I can think like this since those people who asked to marry me, although they are as dear to me as brothers, would be equally impossible as husbands. Why I feel this I truthfully don’t know. Like all women, I set my sights very high, and I believed in remaining free for the coming Revolution. Anyway, I have always looked upon marriage without love as a kind of prostitution.

After the partnership there was nothing those who had been taunting my mother could say. I was a partner in a day school in Paris, even if it was less grand than they assumed. None of us was lazy, but educational establishments crowded the neighborhood, and our rent was very high. In the evening after classes we gave lessons to supplement our income. Even Mme Vollier, although she was very old, gave some. And to a lesser degree she told her sons the same lies I had told my mother.

“If your daughter earns so much money,” people asked my mother, “why doesn’t she ever send you any presents?” Moreover, I hadn’t been able to go see her during our vacation. We had only a week’s vacation a year in our day schools, because otherwise we would have lost our students. Parents who had to look after their children only when they weren’t in class couldn’t or wouldn’t take complete charge of them for a vacation of more than eight or ten days each year. Then, too, because we were giving private lessons, we couldn’t get away for long. Besides, how could we have made enough money to pay the terrible rent if there had been no income for a month?

My mother came to Paris to see the situation for herself. A warm friendship sprang up between her and Mme Vollier, who resembled my grandmother. The two of them used to say bad things about me, but what a good two weeks we spent during my mother’s first visit, with one exception.

It was the evening of my mother’s arrival, and the three of us were dining together. I was so happy that it seemed inevitable that this happiness would be disturbed. I was right. A great lout of a man with shifty eyes came to the door unexpectedly and demanded payment for a promissory note I had completely forgotten about. He came just at the moment when I was speaking warmly to my mother—not to deceive her but to reassure her—about a resolution I had made not to spend everything I had for books. The obvious silence of Mme Vollier while I was saying this didn’t presage anything good, and the intrusion of that jackass showed in the most absolute possible way that I was lying. Mme Vollier, then, to put my mother at ease, took part of the rent money that her sons had just finished getting together and gave it to the man. It was just enough to pay off the note. My mother sent me the sum when she returned to Vroncourt, and she gently drew my attention to how many deprivations my purchasing books had already caused her. I didn’t buy any more books for a long time, but it was hard to resist, for there were so many that tempted me and to me books were everything.

Except for being unhappy over the struggle for existence, I have never been unhappy as a teacher. When we played games during recess, I had a magnificent time with the older students. We extemporized dramas that we performed for the younger children. Through every¬ thing I stayed young.

One Sunday, alone at Mme Vollier’s, I was sitting at the piano trying to write some music that I knew would never see the light of day. It was no less than an opera, The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath. I knew it would never be presented, and I had resigned myself to that fact bravely. It is impossible to find publishers when you’re unknown, and you can’t be known until you find a publisher. You don’t waste your time dragging your manuscripts into waiting rooms. You continue your regular trade, whatever it is. If you don’t have a trade, I, at least, would rather become a ragpicker than go looking for recommendations to influence publishers. I even feel a kind of pleasure in throwing stanzas and motifs and sketches into the wind.

The plot I had written for The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath was a simple one. After the destruction of all life on our planet, hell was established here, where things were very suitable. In the first act, the end of life has already been caused by a geological revolution. The stage looks like a lunar landscape. Satan is seated on top of a Parisian building whose base rests in molten lava.

The basis of all the action is the love that Satan and the other main character, Don Juan, have for a druidess. Their love for her kindles an infernal war. Every person in history, poetry, or legend who ever inspired me had a role to suit his character in my drama.

The end comes when the globe itself crumbles. All the spirits are absorbed in the forces of nature, whose chorus is heard in a night crossed by flashes of lightning. The general clamor of the orchestra diminishes little by little. First one instrument, then another, becomes silent. Finally nothing is left but a chorus of harps, and one after the other they too fall silent. Then only one remains, and it fades in a pianissimo sweeter than water falling on leaves. At last these final notes also fade away, and all is silent.

I scored this work for every instrument possible, from cannon to harmonicas, lyres, flutes, bugles, and guitars. A choir of devils speaks wordlessly-onstage with violins, twenty of them. To hold this monstrous orchestra you’d need a valley in the mountains or some bay in the New World.

As I was working at the piano that Sunday on the music for the scene of the infernal hunt, someone rang the doorbell. It was an old Jewess, the grandmother of one of my pupils. She stood as straight as the ghost of Don Juan’s commander, and she was very beautiful. Her face looked as if it had been carved from marble. She must have been listening to me outside.

“Is it really you,” she asked, “who is responsible for that savagery I have been hearing?”

“Yes,” I answered. “It is I.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t dare to continue those horrors in front of me,” she said. “To punish you, I want to hear the rest.”

Because of that challenge I started The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath over. The wild motifs made her indignant, but I kept going. She wasn’t so hard on several parts, and she liked the love songs. She liked the “Ballad of the Skeleton.”

Lady of the green turrets

Who sings to the evening stars,

Come down and open up my heart.

White are my hands before you

And faithful my love. Come:

Then I will have light

In my eyeless sockets

And I will see

The tournament’s queen of beauty.

At the end of the ballad the girl, of course, has fallen in love with the skeleton, and she follows him off into the unknown. They go off into a valley of solitude to the accompaniment of only a lute solo.

The old lady also deigned to approve my “Lay of the Troubadour”:

The bird was singing

As it shivered

Beneath the falling leaves.

And in the wind,

The soul took wing,

And was crying,

Crying.

I went on through the finale, and after my grotesque imitation on the piano of the last fading notes of the last harp, the Jewess looked at me with amazement.

“Poor girl,” she said. “Those monstrosities really are yours.”

I didn’t answer.

“The most unfortunate thing about it is that there are some good parts there.”

“If there weren’t any good parts,” I said, “I wouldn’t be stupid enough to work on it.”

“You know very well,” she said, “that you have to be either rich or famous to indulge in things like that.”

“I’m not simply indulging myself. I intend to stay on here as a teacher, and as proof I shall leave this unproducible piece just the way it is now. It really is a dream, you know, whether it is about covens or real life, and I will throw it away as I have thrown away other dreams.”

She took my hand. Hers was cold.

“Your heart,” she said. “Where will you throw it?”

“To the Revolution,” I said.

She sat down at the piano and her icy hands glided over the keys. She began to play some invocation to the God of Israel. In it you could feel the desert and the calm of death, and this calm went straight to my heart. Sometime later this lady took me to a synagogue, where the strangeness of the rites and rhythms, a sort of Kyrie in a majestic place, took hold of me. Seeing the tears in my eyes, she believed I had been touched by the grace of Jehovah.

“No,” I told her. “It’s just that an impression has taken hold of me. Perhaps everything is that way.”

I wrote out part of the score for The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath to give to my friend Charles de Sivry. From laziness I substituted a gradual diminuendo for the final catastrophe, which saved me about ten leaves. It’s so boring to write out a fair copy.

None of the part where the orchestra fades out and ends on the last harp note appeared worth any great effort. The Revolution was rising,

so what good were dramas? The true drama was in the streets, so what good were orchestras? We had cannon.

Today the room where I lived in Montmartre is inhabited by people whom I do not know, but like the house near the cemetery at Vroncourt, I like to let my memory rest on it for an instant. It has been so very long.

The last time I saw Vroncourt was during the vacation of 1865. I went there with Mme Eudes, then Victorine Louvet. She was very young then, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, and she was preparing for her teacher’s examination.

During the illness from which she died so young, after her return from exile, Victorine still talked to me about that autumn vacation in Vroncourt. We had gone together into the woods, and I had shown her the oak tree where oaths were exchanged. The Tomb was still standing then, and I took her to see that, too. She went with my mother into the vineyard, which was full of young trees my mother had planted. One evening, as we went through the forest from Thol to Clefmont, going to the home of “Uncle” Marchal, an old forester who had just married off his daughter, the regular steps and luminous eyes of a wolf followed us the whole way. That gave me the setting for “The Legend of the Oak.”

The Legend of the Oak

1 .

Beneath the oak the priestess stands,

Vines of verbena entwining her hair,

Silence seizes the shadowed forest,

Except for the bards and the mystical priests,

Spreading their tools for the rite.

The great songs end; the air holds their echo.

Wind-blown branches strum the strings of a lute.

From goblets of oak the white bull’s blood pours,

But the sacrificed beast cries out in his pain,

A sinister omen.

The priestess beseeches the fates and hears The rumbling storm demand she give A human sacrifice. He comes To let his blood be poured on the earth,

Let out of his heart with a golden scythe.

His death-glow lighting the purpling sky,

He waits the ennobling martyr’s death.

She strikes his heart with her golden scythe And trembling, strikes herself, to fall Piercing her heart again.

2 .

Fierce, proud men of Gaul long past Wore over their hearts a talisman.

The furze that blooms above their bones Allows them to wear their symbol still.

That was the time when every slave Rose against bloody Cesar’s Rome.

That was the time when Gaul was brave And gathered home her scattered sons.

Proud and ferocious great grand-sires,

How long and heavy is your sleep!

O Fathers, omens still occur today,

And your red blood flows in our veins.

You who arm yourselves, why live?

Liberty’s love is stronger than death.

A person must seek for freedom’s joy.

Happy are those who seize the chance!

Marriage fetters a hundredfold;

It gives new slaves to the tyranny Of Tiberius with bloody eyes.

No, we’ll not be slaves in his games.

3.

My friends, beneath the oak is good.

Regardless, oaks keep oaths once sworn,

An oath of love, an oath of hate,

Sealed with blood on the mistletoe.

That vacation in the autumn of 1865 should have lasted forever. My mother’s and grandmother’s joy in seeing me again was as great as my own, but it was over far too soon. When Victorine and I left Vroncourt and those two women, I didn’t dare to turn my head, for my heart was breaking. I was never to see my grandmother Marguerite again. But it was the moment when the struggle against the Empire was intensifying and each person kept his place, as small as it was.

I am afraid to dwell too long on this first period of my life, the days of calm with tormenting dreams. I have described puerile and childish things; that is the way of every person’s earlier years, and sometimes it lasts throughout whole lives. As I continue the narrative I will return to moments and events from these early times, drawn by some association or other; sometimes the pen, like spoken words, rushes off pursuing its own goal.