Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charlotte Bronte [193]
Breakfast being over and mass attended, the school-bell rung and the rooms filled: a very pretty spectacle was presented in classe. Pupils and teachers sat neatly arrayed, orderly, and expectant, each bearing in her hand the bouquet of felicitation—the prettiest spring-flowers all fresh, and filling the air with their fragrance: I only had no bouquet. I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me. Mademoiselle St. Pierre marked my empty hands—she could not believe I had been so remiss; with avidity her eye roved over and round me: surely I must have some solitary symbolic flower somewhere: some small knot of violets, something to win to myself praise for taste, commendation for ingenuity. The unimaginative ‘Anglaise’ proved better than the Parisienne’s fears: she sat literally unprovided, as bare of bloom or leaf as the winter tree. This ascertained, Zélie smiled well pleased.
‘How wisely you have acted to keep your money, Miss Lucie,’ she said: ‘silly I have gone and thrown away two francs on a bouquet of hot-house flowers!’
And she showed with pride her splendid nosegay.
But hush! a step: the step. It came prompt, as usual, but with a promptitude, we felt disposed to flatter ourselves, inspired by other feelings than mere excitability of nerve, and vehemence of intent. We thought our professor’s ‘foot-fall’ (to speak romantically) had in it a friendly promise this morning; and so it had.
He entered in a mood which made him as good as a new sunbeam to the already well-lit first-classe. The morning light, playing amongst our plants and laughing on our walls, caught an added lustre from M. Paul’s all-benignant salute. Like a true Frenchman (though I don’t know why I should say so, for he was of strain neither French nor Labassecourien), he had dressed for the ‘situation’ and the occasion. Not by the vague folds, sinister and conspirator-like, of his soot-dark paletot were the outlines of his person obscured; on the contrary, his figure (such as it was, I don’t boast of it) was well set off by a civilized coat and a silken vest quite pretty to behold. The defiant and pagan bonnet-grec had vanished: bare-headed he came upon us, carrying a Christian hat in his gloved hand. The little man looked well, very well; there was a clearness of amity in his blue eye, and a glow of good feeling on his dark complexion, which passed perfectly in the place of beauty: one really did not care to observe that his nose, though far from small, was of no particular shape, his cheek thin, his brow marked and square, his mouth no rosebud: one accepted him as he was, and felt his presence the reverse of damping or insignificant.
He passed to his desk; he placed on the same his hat and gloves. ‘Bon jour, mes amies,’ said he, in a tone that somehow made amends to some amongst us for many a sharp snap and savage snarl: not a jocund, good-fellow tone, still less an unctuous priestly accent, but a voice he had belonging to himself—a voice used when his heart passed the word to his lips. That same heart did speak sometimes; though an irritable, it was not an ossified organ: in its core was a place, tender beyond a man’s tenderness; a place that humbled him to little children, that bound him to girls and women; to whom, rebel as he would, he could not disown his affinity, nor quite deny that,