The Test of True Friendship — Villette

Madame Beck's order to forget the professors has the opposite effect. The tale from the Rue des Mages has shown Lucy one grand love that watched a tomb for twenty years, and sacrifices to match it. She knows the sort of pale, kind, inert girl Justine Marie must have been, and she is not frightened off by a picture or by charities that swallow a man's income. For a week the questions keep her awake. She wants to see the Christian hero in the face of the man in the bandit bonnet-grec.

The test comes the next afternoon, and it is not heroic. Madame Beck is teaching. Lucy is copying an engraving, pleased with her own finical labour, when a paletôt bursts in, crushes the drawing, and carries her, her chair, and her desk into the grand hall. Two magnificent, sneering college professors wait there, Messieurs Boissec and Rochemorte. Paul says they call him a forger: he writes essays, signs pupils' names, and boasts of the work. Lucy must disprove it. They had seen a composition he had shown about, one he had never praised to her. Classics are a blank. French history is a blank. On subjects she does know, the ideas rise and the words do not. One examiner whispers whether she is an idiot. She tells them to let her go, then breaks into tears that are mostly anger. Paul looks reproach, not comfort.

They still will not release her. She must write. Rochemorte names the theme Human Justice. She is ready to refuse, and then she knows the faces. They are the men who, on her first night in Villette, stared from a portico and drove a friendless foreigner through the streets. She writes Justice as a red, random beldame in a den of confusion, warm by her own fire, smoking a short black pipe, sipping Mrs Sweeny's syrup, settling the weak with the poker, and flinging sugar-plums to the strong and violent. Paul reads it over her shoulder. She curtsies and withdraws.

After school they quarrel. He calls her a little mocker without a heart and goes out to the garden. She does not want him gone for good, only checked. By the glass door she pretends she knows nothing of him: no home, no ties, pupils turned out like ware, boots he never blacks. He says he lives in a hole, that his ten fingers are his servants, and that nothing now living loves him except a few old and poor hearts. She describes the pleasant old house, the priest, the picturesque servant, and the jewelled woman bent double, and says she heard a story called The Priest's Pupil while the rain fell. She paints that pupil as avaricious, inconstant, and unforgiven, then admits the unchristian revenge of heaping coals of fire. He asks her to look at him. Knowing his antecedents, his faults, and his burdens, can they still be friends, close friends, she the sister of a poor, fettered man? She cannot answer in words. He takes her hand, and the support feels like rock. She asks if he is serious. He gives no promises. His little sister must tease and try him. She confesses the fear that the happiness will melt, as it once did. He has feared, for more than a day or a month, that she would weary of his moods. A quiet courage comes to her from making him secure.

He asks if she saw the nun's portrait, and if she connects it with the figure they saw in the berceau. She will not call a saint in heaven jealous of an earthly friendship, and she believes a natural explanation will come. Before she can ask whether those morbid fancies trouble him as well, Fifine Beck bursts in, rosy and abrupt. Lucy is wanted in town as interpreter for an English family who have applied for a prospectus.