Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charlotte Bronte [51]
‘Will you,’ said she, ‘go backward or forward?’ indicating with her hand, first, the small door of communication with the dwelling-house, and then the great double portals of the classes or school-rooms.
‘En avant,’ai I said.
‘But,’ pursued she, cooling as I warmed, and continuing the hard look, from very antipathy to which I drew strength and determination, ‘can you face the classes, or are you over-excited?’
She sneered slightly in saying this—nervous excitability was not much to madame’s taste.
‘I am no more excited than this stone,’ I said, tapping the flag with my toe: ‘or than you,’ I added, returning her look.
‘Bon! But let me tell you these are not quiet, decorous English girls you are going to encounter. Ce sont des Labassecouriennes, rondes, franches, brusques, et tant soit peu rebelles.’aj
I said: ‘I know; and I know, too, that though I have studied French hard since I came here yet I still speak it with far too much hesitation—too little accuracy to be able to command their respect: I shall make blunders that will lay me open to the scorn of the most ignorant. Still I mean to give the lesson.’
‘They always throw over timid teachers,’ said she.
‘I know that, too, madame; I have heard how they rebelled against and persecuted Miss Turner’—a poor, friendless English teacher, whom madame had employed, and lightly discarded; and to whose piteous history I was no stranger.
‘C’est vrai,‘ak said she, coolly. ‘Miss Turner had no more command over them than a servant from the kitchen would have had. She was weak and wavering; she had neither tact nor intelligence, decision nor dignity. Miss Turner would not do for these girls at all.’
I made no reply, but advanced to the closed school-room door.
‘You will not expect aid from me, or from any one,’ said madame. ‘That would at once set you down as incompetent for your office.’
I opened the door, let her pass with courtesy, and followed her. There were three school-rooms, all large. That dedicated to the second division, where I was to figure, was considerably the largest, and accommodated an assemblage more numerous, more turbulent, and infinitely more unmanageable than the other two. In after days, when I knew the ground better, I used to think sometimes (if such a comparison may be permitted), that the quiet, polished, tame first division, was to the robust, riotous demonstrative second division, what the English House of Lords is to the House of Commons.
The first glance informed me that many of the pupils were more than girls—quite young women; I knew that some of them were of noble family (as nobility goes in Labassecour), and I was well convinced that not one amongst them was ignorant of my position in madame’s household. As I mounted the estrade (a low platform, raised a step above the flooring), where stood the teacher’s chair and desk, I beheld opposite to me a row of eyes and brows that threatened stormy weather—eyes full of an insolent light, and brows hard and unblushing as marble. The continental ‘female’ is quite a different being to the insular ‘female’ of the same age and class: I never saw such eyes and brows in England. Madame Beck introduced me in one cool phrase, sailed from the room, and left me alone in my glory.
I shall never forget that first lesson, nor all the undercurrent of life and character it opened up to me. Then first did I begin rightly to see the wide difference that lies between the novelist’s and poet’s ideal ‘jeune fille,’ and the said jeune fille’ as she really is.
It seems that three titled belles in the first row had sat down predetermined that a bonne d ‘enfants should not give them lessons in English. They knew