Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charlotte Bronte [207]
‘You may well inquire when—where. It seems you turn day into night, and choose a desk for a pillow; rather hard lodging—?’
‘It was softened for me, monsieur, while I slept. That unseen, gift-bringing thing which haunts my desk, remembered me. No matter how I fell asleep; I awoke pillowed and covered.’
‘Did the shawls keep you warm?’
‘Very warm. Do you ask thanks for them?’
‘No. You looked pale in your slumbers; are you home-sick?’
‘To be home-sick, one must have a home; which I have not.’
‘Then you have more need of a careful friend. I scarcely know any one, Miss Lucy, who needs a friend more absolutely than you; your very faults imperatively require it. You want so much checking, regulating, and keeping down.’
This idea of ‘keeping down’ never left M. Paul’s head; the most habitual subjugation would, in my case, have failed to relieve him of it. No matter; what did it signify? I listened to him, and did not trouble myself to be too submissive; his occupation would have been gone, had I left him nothing to ‘keep down.’
‘You need watching, and watching over,’ he pursued; ‘and it is well for you that I see this, and do my best to discharge both duties. I watch you and others pretty closely, pretty constantly, nearer and oftener than you or they think. Do you see that window with a light in it?’
He pointed to a lattice in one of the college boarding-houses. ‘That,’ said he, ‘is a room I have hired, nominally for a study—virtually for a post of observation. There I sit and read for hours together: it is my way—my taste. My book is this garden; its contents are human nature—female human nature. I know you all by heart. Ah! I know you well—St. Pierre the Parisienne—cette mâitresse-femme,hf my cousin Beck herself.’
‘It is not right, monsieur.’
‘Comment; it is not right? By whose creed? Does some dogma of Calvin or Luther condemn it? What is that to me? I am no Protestant. My rich father (for, though I have known poverty, and once starved for a year in a garret in Rome—starved wretchedly, often on a meal a day, and sometimes not that—yet I was born to wealth)—my rich father was a good Catholic; and he gave me a priest and a Jesuit for a tutor. I retain his lessons; and to what discoveries, grand Dieu! have they not aided me!’
‘Discoveries made by stealth seem to me dishonourable discoveries.’
‘Puritaine! I doubt it not. Yet see how my Jesuit’s system works. You know the St. Pierre?’
‘Partially.’
He laughed. ‘You say right—‘partially;’ whereas, I know her thoroughly; there is the difference. She played before me the amiable; offered me patte de velours;hg caressed, flattered, fawned on me. Now, I am accessible to a woman’s flattery—accessible against my reason. Though never pretty, she was—when I first knew her—young, or knew how to look young. Like all her countrywomen, she had the art of dressing—she had a certain, cool, easy, social assurance, which spared me the pain of embarrassment—’
‘Monsieur, that must have been unnecessary. I never saw you embarrassed in my life.’
‘Mademoiselle, you know little of me; I can be embarrassed as a petite pensionnaire; there is a fund of modesty and diffidence in my nature—’
‘Monsieur, I never saw it.’
‘Mademoiselle, it is there. You ought to have seen it.’
‘Monsieur, I have observed you in public—on platforms, in tribunes, before titles and crowned heads—and you were as easy as you are in the third division.’
‘Mademoiselle, neither titles nor crowned heads excite my modesty; and publicity is very much my element. I like it well, and breathe in it quite freely; but—but—in short, here is the sentiment brought into action, at this very moment; however, I disdain to be worsted by it. If, mademoiselle, I were a marrying man (which I am not; and you may spare yourself the trouble of any sneer you may be contemplating at the thought), and found it necessary to ask a lady whether she could look upon me in the light of a future husband, then would it be proved that I am as I say—modest.’
I quite believed him now; and, in believing, I honoured him with a