Villette

him on irksome errands when he was staggering with weariness; he tried the temper, the sense, and the health; and it was only when every severest test had been applied and endured, when the most corrosive aquafortis had been used, and failed to tarnish the ore, that he admitted it genuine and, still in clouded silence, stamped it with his deep brand of approval.
    I speak not ignorant of these evils.
    Till the date at which the last chapter closes, M. Paul had not been my professor – he had not given me lessons, but about that time, accidentally hearing me one day acknowledge an ignorance of some branch of education (I think it was arithmetic) which would have disgraced a charity-schoolboy, as he very truly remarked, he took me in hand, examined me first, found me, I need not say, abundantly deficient, gave me some books and appointed me some tasks.
    He did this at first with pleasure, indeed with unconcealed exultation, condescending to say that he believed I was »bonne et pas trop faible« (
i.e.
well enough disposed, and not wholly destitute of parts) but, owing he supposed to adverse circumstances, »as yet in a state of wretchedly imperfect mental development.«
    The beginning of all efforts has indeed with me been marked by a preternatural imbecility. I never could, even in forming a common acquaintance, assert or prove a claim to average quickness. A depressing and difficult passage has prefaced every new page I have turned in life.
    So long as this passage lasted, M. Paul was very kind, very good, very forbearing; he saw the sharp pain inflicted, and felt the weighty humiliation imposed by my own sense of incapacity; and words can hardly do justice to his tenderness and helpfulness. His own eyes would moisten, when tears of shame and effort clouded mine; burdened as he was with work, he would steal half his brief space of recreation to give to me.
    But, strange grief! when that heavy and overcast dawn began at last to yield to day; when my faculties began to struggle themselves free, and my time of energy and fulfilment came; when I voluntarily doubled, trebled, quadrupled the tasks he set, to please him as I thought, his kindness became sternness; the light changed in his eyes from a beam to a spark; he fretted, he opposed, he curbed me imperiously; the more I did, the harder I worked, the less he seemed content. Sarcasms of which the severity amazed and puzzled me, harassed my ears; then flowed out the bitterest inuendoes against the »pride of intellect.« I was vaguely threatened with, I know not what doom, if I ever trespassed the limits proper to my sex, and conceived a contraband appetite for unfeminine knowledge. Alas! I had no such appetite. What I loved, it joyed me by any effort to content; but the noble hunger for science in the abstract – the godlike thirst after discovery – these feelings were known to me but by briefest flashes.
    Yet, when M. Paul sneered at me, I wanted to possess them more fully; his injustice stirred in me ambitious wishes – it imparted a strong stimulus – it gave wings to aspiration.
    In the beginning, before I had penetrated to motives, that uncomprehended sneer of his made my heart ache, but by-and-by it only warmed the blood in my veins, and sent added action to my pulses. Whatever my powers – feminine or the contrary – God had given them, and I felt resolute to be ashamed of no faculty of His bestowal.
    The combat was very sharp for a time. I seemed to have lost M. Paul's affection; he treated me strangely. In his most unjust moments he would insinuate that I had deceived him when I appeared, what he called ›faible‹ – that is, incompetent; he said I had feigned a false incapacity. Again, he would turn suddenly round and accuse me of the most far-fetched imitations and impossible plagiarisms, asserting that I had extracted the pith out of books I had not so much as heard of – and over the perusal of which I should infallibly have fallen down in a sleep as deep as that of Eutychus.
    Once, upon his preferring such an accusation, I turned upon him – I rose against him. Gathering an armful of his books out of my desk, I filled my apron and poured them in a heap upon his estrade, at his feet.
    »Take them away, M. Paul,« I said, »and teach me no more. I never asked to be made learned, and you compel me to feel very profoundly that learning is not happiness.«
    And returning to my desk, I laid my head on my arms, nor would I speak to him for two days