In a certain street in the Latin Quarter was situated a certain house, and in that house lived a certain number of residents. It is the resident who lived in the garret apartment with which our story is concerned. We will leave the rest of these residents to their lives. In this garret apartment - for the house's construction only allowed enough space for one little garret, owing to the slanting ceilings and odd corners at the roof.
One young woman lived there, alone in the garret, without any family or friends as room-mates. Her family were mostly dead, at the time we open our story; and she did indeed have a number of friends in a variety of social circles; she merely preferred her dwelling to be solitary.
We will spare a few words for her history.
She was born in a little town in a certain province, the eighth child to a family that was prosperous, and not wealthy, and boasted of seven sons born before her. Her poor mother had wished in her heart for a household full of daughters, but alas! she was the only one in a family full of boys. The mother was overcome with such joy at finally having brought forth a daughter, that the child was christened with all the names the mother had been saving for female offspring, and thus this child was christened Hermangarde Ophélie Marie Opal Améthystine Esméralda Thérèse Thiérry de Quiquevaille. Her father, who was not of the nobility, clung desperately to his particle, the only remaining shred of upper class evident in the family and its name. In the mouth of a small child, this enormous name got shortened to Phélie, a smaller mouthful and thus far easier to pronounce, and so she was to her family and her friends.
Phélie was always a beautiful child. Even as an infant in the cradle, people would remark that she would grow up to be a famous beauty. Her eyes, deep blue as a baby, darkened to an unusual violet; another feature that caused people to exclaim over her in the street. Her nose was perfectly formed; her eyebrows perfectly arched. She had a high, smooth forehead; from the crown of her head grew beautiful tresses of deep raven black. Her mother loved her child's hair, which she allowed to grow thick and long, and as the baby grew into a little girl, the mother delighted too in lovingly brushing and arranging her hair, perhaps to show off to her neighbours that her child was prettier than theirs.
Her brothers were all one by one sent off to boarding school; but Phélie's mother insisted on keeping her close, and educating the little girl herself. Her brothers would come home, full of stories of new friends they had met while away and resentment for teachers who were too hard on them. Phélie wished for an education too - something more than the lady's education from her mother, which she found dull, unfulfilling, and terribly boring.
One day, one of her brothers came home with an illness that he had caught from one of the children there. The people at the school had sent all the children home at the first signs of illness, but Phélie's brother had already gotten the disease, whose symptoms showed as he arrived back at the house. The disease, which Phélie herself didn't catch, slowly spread to the rest of her family. Her brother died, he who brought the illness home; then her mother, then four brothers, then her father. She was left with two brothers, one of whom, like her, did not catch the illness; the other of whom had a much weakened constitution as a result, and was never the same hale and hearty young man he was before the disease. The healthy brother, Marc-Antoine, had passed his baccalauréat, and was trying to convince his father to send him to law school in Paris. But with the death of the large part of their family, he had had to change his goals slightly. He determined to take Phélie and their brother, Paul-Hyacinthe, to Paris - so that he could study law there, and still find ways to provide for his young siblings, who were both at this time too young to look after themselves.
The family's inheritance enabled the two children and their older brother to travel to Paris, and rent several rooms in a comfortable house, as well as for Marc-Antoine to pay for his entrance to the law school, and for his books and exams. Thus, in 1817, Phélie at eight years old, with her delicate brother of ten, and her older brother of eighteen, became Parisians, renouncing their provincial origins. Marc-Antoine, not oblivious to the sensitive nature of the upbringing of little girls, scraped together some money to pay for a companion to the girl: a woman who was younger, perhaps by ten years, than their mother had been, who had lost her two children to illness and her father to the Russian's in Bonaparte's army. This woman, Marie-Thérèse, served as chaperone to Phélie and maidservant to all three of them.
However good and lofty an older brother's intentions, however, they can never replace those of a child's true father. A brother may have a good heart, yet not possess the necessary qualities for raising a family. Marc-Antoine was young, healthy, intelligent, and understood the great responsibility that had been laid upon his shoulders, and undertook with all his might to handle it as well as he can. He tried with a will, every day, but he could not make the family as happy or as healthy as it had been before illness had borne away their siblings and parents. He awoke early every morning and was often the last to bed, spending his days torn between studies and classes, and the odd jobs he found around the city to support his younger siblings, and Marie-Thérèse.
However much he tried, all his best intentions soon began to wither away, as some time began to pass.
Paul-Hyacinthe spent more and more time on the streets of Paris, rebelling against older Marc-Antoine more and more. He grew thin and wiry in Paris, and began befriending the local street urchins. One day he didn't come home. Phélie spotted him on a street corner with three other urchins on a walk with Marie-Thérèse. She didn't understand why he hadn't come home in a week, and called out to him.
"Paulin! Paul-Hyacinthe! It's your sister, oh, why won't you come home!" But the boy ignored his sister's cries, pretending he didn't hear, that he didn't even know the silly little girl who kept calling his name.
Phélie ran across the street to talk to him. That didn't do her any more good.
"Listen," said her brother to her, when she approached, smiling, her hands outstretched to him, "listen, Phélie, you can't call me that anymore. They call me Jacques now. I'm not ever coming home, ever! Don't you see how cruel it is, to be living all day with your brother? Wouldn't you rather live and be free all day, never having to study or work, but only to run and play?"
Phélie started to cry upon hearing these harsh words from her brother, and ran across the street to her chaperone, back to Marie-Thérèse, who had been urgently calling the little girl back to her.
"Watch out!" Though Paul-Hyacinthe, now Jacques, claimed to have no family anymore, he still remembered his fraternal love for his sister. He had seen the carriage and its two horses hurtling down the street when Phélie had not, and frantically ran after her, to pull her out of the way.
He was too late. The horses struck him, dropping him to the cobbled streets; after having swerved to miss the little girl fleeing across the street, they couldn't fail to hit her brother in hot pursuit. He was dead before Phélie or Marie-Thérèse could get to him.
"Watch where you're going, street scum!" A fashionably-dressed, though fantastically ugly, young man leaned his head out of the window of the carriage. "Look, your foolish brother has injured my horse-see how he favours his foreleg." The young dandy had not yet seen Phélie, who was crouched next to her brother, eyes as wide as saucers and as pale as fine china. But upon hearing this disdainful proclamation, she stood up.
"My brother is not street scum. Who cares if your horse has a sore foot; he has killed my brother." She looked unflinchingly at the dandy as she said this, unaware of the effect or possible consequences of these words. Marie-Thérèse made to pull the little girl back, horrorstruck.
The dandy saw the little girl and was struck by how pretty she was, and this caused him to actually get out of his carriage and examine the dead boy, then his sister. Her hair was long and flowing, and she had long ago unplaited her hair which Marie-Thérèse had carefully done up for her earlier that morning. Her eyes were shining with tears, and a deep blue-violet, a shade that could captivate even then coldest heart. She was small, but not frail; she was sweet, but not fragile; she was a small girl but she was not timid or afraid. All this the dandy saw, and considered. Finally he spoke. "All right, so he is dead. I cannot give him back to you, but perhaps you will allow me to pay to have him buried."
"With a gravestone with his name on it," prompted Phélie. "I've seen the beggar's graves, you know, they throw dozens of bodies in and don't even say who's in there. How do their families find them, then? I want to be able to find my brother even when I'm old."
"Yes," said the dandy, "all right, with a gravestone with his name on it." He went back to his carriage, and came back with a little embossed card. "I live at this address, just send to me and I'll take care of everything."
This was the first time, but certainly far from the last time, that Hermangarde-Ophelie was able to use her natural beauty and charms to talk a man into doing what she wanted. At the time, she was too young, too innocent, too experienced in the ways of the world to understand very well what had happened, what she had really done, and how she had done it.
But the worthy Marie-Thérèse saw immediately how this silly fop had looked at her charge - saw the gaze he assumed once he caught sight of this beautiful and extraordinary child that was in her charge. She knew right away that she would have to be more careful on behalf of this little girl, who would one day grow up to be a formidable young lady with plenty of feminine wiles at her disposal. Marie-Thérèse, though now old, certainly understood woman's wiles, for what woman does not? She had understood her own feminine charms and had employed them at many times during her youth, and determined that she would teach this little girl not only how to use her natural charms - an envy for any woman who had to painstakingly acquire charm, wit, and beauty, was a younger woman or girl who had them naturally without having to work for them at all - but also how to protect herself from men who preyed on her because of those charms.
Marie-Thérèse therefore took the little girl firmly by the hand, after, of course, she had made definite arrangements for the burial of Paul-Hyacinthe. She took the girl home, and set her to her studies, and waited for Marc-Antoine to come home. It was very late before the young man appeared - he had gotten a job only this week as a waiter at one of the Latin Quarter restaurants popular among students, a restaurant which was therefore open late. His haggard appearance and look of sheer exhaustion softened the old lady's heart and the stern lecture she had planned for him.
"Your brother is dead," she said. "He was hit by a carriage this afternoon."
"What!" Marc-Antoine was stupefied by this revelation. "But we have not seen him in above a week! How do you know he was killed?"
"Phélie happened to see him on the street. I wouldn't have noticed him if not for her." Briefly, Marie-Thérèse recounted the events of the afternoon: how the boy proclaimed himself no longer part of the family, but had courageously tried to save his sister from certain death from a coach-and-four, dying himself in the process - and the dandy whom Phélie had talked unwittingly into doing anything she asked of him, including paying for her brother's funeral Mass. Marie-Thérèse was most solemn and emphatic when explaining the intentions she had in mind for the little girl, and her worries and concerns about the frequency of this sort of thing happening in the future.
"No. You are right. I knew it when we came to Paris," said Marc-Antoine with a sigh, "she will be noticed. That is why I undertook to find her a chaperone like you. If she were a little boy I would have simply taken care of both young boys myself, but with a girl I cannot teach her anything or lead her anywhere. What would you have me do? I cannot think of what else I can do, that I can afford to take care of."
Marie-Thérèse smiled. "Make sure she has friends. Send her to convent-school. There are nuns and convents in this city who will take girls on charity, especially if they are known to be orphans. All you need to do is take her to one of these schools, explain that you are her brother and her parents are dead, and they will understand. A brother can not be a girl's mother, no matter how he tries."
"But how should I know what school to send her to? I have never been to Paris before; I don't know anything about these things!" Marc-Antoine seemed desperate, and lost, and very unsure. "Are you sure it is so important?"
"Yes," said Marie-Thérèse firmly, "otherwise she will end up like her brother, and you don't want that to happen."
"No, I don't. What do you advise, then?"
Marie-Thérèse smiled. "Send her to the school at the convent at Petit-Picpus. The nuns there are devout, and they educate girls of all ages and walks of life, from poor pauper orphans to even children of rich nobles. She will be able to make plenty of necessary friends there."
Marc-Antoine was convinced of the soundness of the old lady's gesture and her advice, but still he wavered. Of all his family, Phélie was the only one left. All his brothers and sisters were dead; his parents were dead; his grandparents lived far away in the provinces, and his cousins also. He didn't want to be alone, without any family at all. He delayed on sending her to the school. First he said it was because the school year had already begun - and at the time Marie-Thérèse had the conversation with him, it was true; then, when it was time for a new school year, he delayed again, saying he thought Phélie was ill and he didn't want to send her to a convent to make all the other girls ill; the year after that, when Phélie was ten years old, he went to inquire at the school and they said they had closed the school to new enrollees since there were already too many. Finally, in 1820, Phélie herself, who was by now eleven and much taller and much prettier than she had ever been before, begged him to take her to the school: she was bored at home, she had already read everything in the house twice over (even his law textbooks!) and wanted more education. Marc-Antoine consented, being absolutely unwilling to refuse his little sister anything, and Phélie became a schoolgirl of the convent of the Petit-Picpus.
When Marc-Antoine came to the door, and announced his intentions to have his sister Hermangarde-Ophélie become a pupil there, the nun in charge smiled. The school was described to him, since he was not allowed to set foot further into the convent than this entrance hall, and the rules were explained to them in detail. Phélie looked around her with wide eyes, taking in the surroundings in silence while her brother and her chaperone took care of the details. Marie-Thérèse had had the foresight to get the girl the appropriate uniform all the schoolgirls there wore, and Phélie had already put one of the dresses on. Marc-Antoine was surprised at the strictness of the rules regarding visitors, but one look at Phélie told him it was a good decision: she already looked eager to begin this new part in her life. He kissed her one more time, then left her to study with the good nuns.
Every visiting day, Marc-Antoine would come. At first he brought Marie-Thérèse, then as time wore on, he brought a girl with whom he'd been living - a grisette named Odèle. Odèle was pretty, had big white teeth, and a few smallpox scars on her cheeks, as well as reddish-blonde curls that fell cheerfully from her head.
One day, some years along into her education, Marc-Antoine and Odèle came to visit, and Phélie was bursting with a story.
The convent life was quiet and sheltered, and previous visits had been full of conversation about the other girls in the school, the nuns, and the things Phélie was studying. Phélie had said all the nuns were surprised at how well she could read, and were often finding new and creative ways to keep the girl interested in her studies. Of course Phélie was always very diligent at her studies, and never whispered to her neighbours during church services or classroom time, and always faithfully read her Bible and prayer books, and studied everything the nuns set her to. She made friends easily, and sometimes one of her schoolgirl friends would laughingly come and pull her by the hand away from Marc-Antoine, to introduce Phélie to her own family.
But this time the story was different.
"Oh, Antoine, you won't ever guess what just happened not too many days ago!" Phélie had grown taller, and even more beautiful, which surprised no one who had ever known her. Though the schoolgirl uniform was severe in its modesty, still you could see the outlines of the new womanly body forming on this girl of fourteen years.
"What happened?" Marc-Antoine was prepared for some girlish story of finding an abandoned baby bird in a nest in a tree, or some secret shared between his sister and some of the other convent girls, or even a scandalous rumour about one of the novice nuns.
"A man showed up, all of a sudden! With his daughter, who goes to the school here."
"What? a man? what does a man need with a convent?"
"No one knows where he came from, but the gardener says the new man is his brother, and they both work in the gardens. They wear bells so that the nuns and the girls know when they are coming and can avoid them. But the gardener says the new man only stays because his daughter - or maybe it's his granddaughter, he's a very old man, Antoine, he's got white hair all over his head - because his daughter has become a pupil here."
Marc-Antoine nodded. "And what is so strange about that? Maybe he is too poor to have any other living."
Phélie shook her head vigourously. "Oh no! It's not that they are here, that is so interesting - it's how they came! Mother Innocent died, and they buried her in the churchyard, and all of a sudden the next day here was this man and this little girl, waiting to be let in. It's as though the nun's death brought them here. It's all anyone has been able to talk about lately."
"Well, it's good for you to have some excitement sometimes!"
And from there he began the familiar discussion of her studies. It was becoming more clear to Marc-Antoine that his little sister was too well-educated to stay in the convent any longer, especially after the remark from the sister that took her out to him in the visiting room, a remark that hinted they were trying to get her to take her vows. True, the nuns here tried to convert all of their pupils into novices of the order, but rarely succeeded. But they had taken a special interest in Phélie, who was by far and away the prettiest and cleverest and most intelligent of all the girls here.
When he got up to leave, at the end of the visiting hours, Phélie flung herself at him for an embrace. "Oh, when will you come to take me home?"
"Are you not happy here, then, Phélie?"
"Oh yes! It's wonderful here. But I miss you. I could come live with you and Odèle again, wouldn't it be nice? Only it's getting boring here, I've learnt everything the sisters know, and they want me to become a nun and I don't think I could be a nun and live here forever and ever, not getting to see the world."
Marc-Antoine smiled at her. "Next time I come visit, tell me whether you want to come home again, and I will arrange it."
Only Phélie never saw her brother come to visiting hours at the convent school again. Two occasions in a row, Phélie was left without any visitors at all. She stopped expecting her brother to come, and told the other girls her brother had found another girl and forgotten all about her.
Then one day, on her sixteenth birthday, she was surprised. One of the sisters came and took her out of the classroom where she was working on needlework, and told her to come right away to the visiting room. Visitors were almost never allowed except on the special days allotted, so she was extra curious.
An older Marie-Thérèse stood waiting. "I have come from your brother," said she to Phélie, "he wants you to come home."
"But I thought he'd forgotten about me!" Phélie exclaimed. "He hasn't come in almost two years. Antoine promised-"
"I know. He got very busy. You see, he decided to finish all of his studies last year, and finally become a lawyer." Marie-Thérèse looked sad. "Your brother told me he felt so very wretched at the thought of not coming to see you, but when he tried to come at a day other than the regular times allowed by the convent, they turned him away, even though he is your only family. He couldn't take himself away from his work on the visiting days. Finally he sent me, told me not to leave until they let me take you home - he's gotten ill and the doctors say this time he won't get better."
"Oh!" Phélie began to cry. "Then I want to go home, now!"
Argument ensued between Marie-Thérèse, and the sister overseeing the visit, until finally upon a tearful plea from the girl herself, the good nun agreed to collect Phélie's things. Marie-Thérèse had hired a man with a cart to bring Phélie and her trunk away from the school. Phélie didn't get the chance to see her schoolmates again, because soon several strong nuns had brought out her trunk to her, and she went home to her brother's apartment to the Latin Quarter again.