and when she did speak it was really to speak. So I wasn’t resentful of her now.
On the contrary she aroused my curiosity. What would she say, and would it conceivably make a difference to me? I had not wanted her to come, nor even thought of her, and I didn’t turn away from the fire to look at her.
But there was a powerful understanding between us. When I had tried to escape this house and been brought back, it was she who had shown me the way out of the pain that followed. Miracles she’d worked for me, though no one around us had ever noticed.
Her first intervention had come when I was twelve, and the old parish priest, who had taught me some poetry by rote and to read an anthem or two in Latin, wanted to send me to school at the nearby monastery.
My father said no, that I could learn all I needed in my own house. But it was my mother who roused herself from her books to do loud and vociferous battle with him. I would go, she said, if I wanted to. And she sold one of her jewels to pay for my books and clothing. Her jewels had all come down to her from an Italian grandmother and each had its story, and this was a hard thing for her to do. But she did it immediately.
My father was angry and reminded her that if this had happened before he went blind, his will would have prevailed surely. My brothers assured him that his youngest son wouldn’t be gone long. I’d come running home as soon as I was made to do something I didn’t want to do.
Well, I didn’t come running home. I loved the monastery school.
I loved the chapel and the hymns, the library with its thousands of old books, the bells that divided the day, the ever repeated rituals. I loved the cleanliness of the place, the overwhelming fact that all things here were well kept and in good repair, that work never ceased throughout the great house and the gardens.
When I was corrected, which wasn’t often, I knew an intense happiness because someone for the first time in my life was trying to make me into a good person, one who could learn things.
Within a month I declared my vocation. I wanted to enter the order. I wanted to spend my life in those immaculate cloisters, in the library writing on parchment and learning to read the ancient books. I wanted to be enclosed forever with people who believed I could be good if I wanted to be.
I was liked there. And that was a most unusual thing. I didn’t make other people there unhappy or angry.
The Father Superior wrote immediately to ask my father’s permission. And frankly I thought my father would be glad to be rid of me.
But three days later my brothers arrived to take me home with them. I cried and begged to stay, but there was nothing the Father Superior could do.
And as soon as we reached the castle, my brothers took away my books and locked me up. I didn’t understand why they were so angry. There was the hint that I had behaved like a fool for some reason. I couldn’t stop crying. I was walking round and round and smashing my fist into things and kicking the door.
Then my brother Augustin started coming in and talking to me. He’d circle the point at first, but what came clear finally was that no member of a great French family was going to be a poor teaching brother. How could I have misunderstood everything so completely? I was sent there to learn to read and write. Why did I always have to go to extremes? Why did I behave habitually like a wild creature?
As for becoming a priest with real prospects within the Church, well, I was the youngest son of this family, now, wasn’t I? I ought to think of my duties to my nieces and nephews.
Translate all that to mean this: We have no money to launch a real ecclesiastical career for you, to make you a bishop or cardinal as befits our rank, so you have to live out your life here as an illiterate and a beggar. Come in the great hall and play chess with your father.
AFTER I got to understand it, I wept right at the supper table, and mumbled words no one understood about this