Madame Beck — Villette

The maîtresse leads Lucy past a kitchen furnace into a cabinet, where she eats meat in an acid sauce, a tartine, and a baked pear. After prayer Madame Beck takes her through dormitories that were nuns' cells into a hot room smelling of whisky. Three children sleep. A woman in a silk dress snores beside a bottle. Madame does not wake her, gives Lucy the fourth bed, and leaves her own door ajar. In the night she returns in her night-dress, studies Lucy's face and hair, turns the clothes inside out, counts the money, reads the memorandum-book, takes a plait of Miss Marchmont's hair, and presses the keys in wax before she refolds everything. At the door her look already contains the sleeper's dismissal.

The sleeper is Mrs. Sweeny, hired as an English lady from Middlesex and in fact Irish, kept a month by a real Indian shawl. When she learns Lucy will replace her, she attacks. Madame steps out. A police agent removes Mrs. Sweeny before the first cup of coffee, and the children's room is fumigated. Lucy dresses Madame once, and never again. That duty passes to Rosine, the portress. Madame, short, stout, and forty, rules the pensionnat, the day pupils, the teachers, the masters, and the parents without bustle. Surveillance and espionage are her watchwords. Interest is the master-key of her nature. She can hear the children say "Gentle Jesus" at Lucy's knee, speak with sense about Englishwomen, and then glide off on silent slippers to listen at doors. For a time Lucy sees only the pleasant outside: easy lessons, a garden of roses, abundant food, and healthy girls.

Then Madame, who has been listening at the nursery door and following Lucy under the trees, asks if she was a governess in England. She was not. The children are her first teaching. After about a fortnight of such tests, Mr. Wilson fails to appear, and sixty girls in the second division are waiting. Lucy pleads the pinafore Fifine wants and would have stayed in the nursery for years. Madame takes her hand. In the carré, flushed and near tears, Lucy sees a face that for a moment looks like a man's, feels the dishonour of her diffidence, and, asked whether she will go backward or forward, says "En avant."

Madame introduces her in one cool phrase and leaves. Blanche, Virginie, and Angélique have decided a nursery governess shall not teach them. The titter becomes a revolt of sixty. Lucy's French is too thin for the rebuke she could have spoken in English, so she takes Blanche de Melcy's book, reads a stupid page, and tears it in two. Dolores, a Catalonian standing by a closet door, keeps the noise up. Lucy shuts her in and pockets the key. The room stills, a smile passes from desk to desk, and the dictation proceeds. Outside, Madame says "C'est bien" and "Ca ira." She has been at the spy-hole the whole time. From that day Lucy is English teacher. Her salary rises, and she does thrice Mr. Wilson's work at half the expense.