Villette by Charlotte Brontë (free e reader .TXT) 📕

“do not quarrel for a word. Tell me, was it I or ce grand fat d’Anglais” (so he profanely denominated Dr. Bretton), “who made your eyes so humid, and your cheeks so hot as they are even now?”

“I am not conscious of you, monsieur, or of any other having excited such emotion as you indicate,” was my answer; and in giving it, I again surpassed my usual self, and achieved a neat, frosty falsehood.

“But what did I say?” he pursued; “tell me: I was angry: I have forgotten my words; what were they?”

“Such as it is best to forget!” said I, still quite calm and chill.

“Then it was my words which wounded you? Consider them unsaid: permit my retractation; accord my pardon.”

“I am not angry, Monsieur.”

“Then you are worse than angry⁠—grieved. Forgive me, Miss Lucy.”

“M. Emanuel, I do forgive you.”

“Let me hear you say, in the voice natural to you, and not in that alien tone, ‘Mon ami, je vous pardonne.’ ”

He made me smile. Who could help smiling at his wistfulness, his simplicity, his earnestness?

“Bon!” he cried. “Voilà que le jour va poindre! Dites donc, mon ami.”

“Monsieur Paul, je vous pardonne.”

“I will have no monsieur: speak the other word, or I shall not believe you sincere: another effort⁠—mon ami, or else in English⁠—my friend!”

Now, “my friend” had rather another sound and significancy than “mon ami;” it did not breathe the same sense of domestic and intimate affection; “mon ami” I could not say to M. Paul; “my friend,” I could, and did say without difficulty. This distinction existed not for him, however, and he was quite satisfied with the English phrase. He smiled. You should have seen him smile, reader; and you should have marked the difference between his countenance now, and that he wore half an hour ago. I cannot affirm that I had ever witnessed the smile of pleasure, or content, or kindness round M. Paul’s lips, or in his eyes before. The ironic, the sarcastic, the disdainful, the passionately exultant, I had hundreds of times seen him express by what he called a smile, but any illuminated sign of milder or warmer feelings struck me as wholly new in his visage. It changed it as from a mask to a face: the deep lines left his features; the very complexion seemed clearer and fresher; that swart, sallow, southern darkness which spoke his Spanish blood, became displaced by a lighter hue. I know not that I have ever seen in any other human face an equal metamorphosis from a similar cause. He now took me to the carriage; at the same moment M. de Bassompierre came out with his niece.

In a pretty humour was Mistress Fanshawe; she had found the evening a grand failure: completely upset as to temper, she gave way to the most uncontrolled moroseness as soon as we were seated, and the carriage-door closed. Her invectives against Dr. Bretton had something venomous in them. Having found herself impotent either to charm or sting him, hatred was her only resource; and this hatred she expressed in terms so unmeasured and proportion so monstrous, that, after listening for a while with assumed stoicism, my outraged sense of justice at last and suddenly caught fire. An explosion ensued: for I could be passionate, too; especially with my present fair but faulty associate, who never failed to stir the worst dregs of me. It was well that the carriage-wheels made a tremendous rattle over the flinty Choseville pavement, for I can assure the reader there was neither dead silence nor calm discussion within the vehicle. Half in earnest, half in seeming, I made it my business to storm down Ginevra. She had set out rampant from the Rue Crécy; it was necessary to tame her before we reached the Rue Fossette: to this end it was indispensable to show up her sterling value and high deserts; and this must be done in language of which the fidelity and homeliness might challenge comparison with the compliments of a John Knox to a Mary Stuart. This was the right discipline for Ginevra; it suited her. I am quite sure she went to bed that night all the better and more settled in mind and mood, and slept all the more sweetly for having undergone a sound moral drubbing.

XXVIII The Watchguard

M. Paul Emanuel owned an acute sensitiveness to the annoyance of interruption, from whatsoever cause occurring, during his lessons: to pass through the classe under such circumstances was considered by the teachers and pupils of the school, individually and collectively, to be as much as a woman’s or girl’s life was worth.

Madame Beck herself, if forced to the enterprise, would “skurry” through, retrenching her skirts, and carefully coasting the formidable estrade, like a ship dreading breakers. As to Rosine, the portress⁠—on whom, every half-hour, devolved the fearful duty of fetching pupils out of the very heart of one or other of the divisions to take their music-lessons in the oratory, the great or little saloon, the salle-à-manger, or some other piano-station⁠—she would, upon her second or third attempt, frequently become almost tongue-tied from excess of consternation⁠—a sentiment inspired by the unspeakable looks levelled at her through a pair of dart-dealing spectacles.

One morning I was sitting in the carré, at work upon a piece of embroidery which one of the pupils had commenced but delayed to finish, and while my fingers wrought at the frame, my ears regaled themselves with listening to the crescendos and cadences of a voice haranguing in the neighbouring classe, in tones that waxed momentarily more unquiet, more ominously varied. There was a good strong partition-wall between me and the gathering storm, as well as a facile means of flight through the glass-door to the court, in case it swept this way; so I am afraid I derived more amusement than alarm from