Every day, every day, it was the same overture in Madame Joubert\'s room in the Institute St. Denis; the strident:
"Mesdemoiselles; à vos places! Notre Père qui est dans le ciel—Qui a fait ce bruit?"
"It\'s Pupasse, madame! It\'s Pupasse!" The answer invariably was unanimous.
"But, Madame Joubert,—I assure you, Madame Joubert,—I could not help it! They know I could not help it!"
By this time the fresh new fool\'s cap made from yesterday\'s "Bee" would have been pinned on her head.
"Quelle injustice! Quelle injustice!"
This last apostrophe in a high, whining nasal voice, always procured Pupasse\'s elevation on the tall three-legged stool in the corner.
It was a theory of the little girls in the primary class that Madame Joubert would be much more lenient to their own little inevitabilities of bad conduct and lessons if Pupasse did not invariably comb her the wrong way every morning after prayers, by dropping something, or sniffling, or sneezing. Therefore, while they distractedly got together books, slates, and copy-books, their infantile eyes found time to dart deadly reproaches toward the corner of penitence, and their little lips, still shaped from their first nourishment, pouted anything but sympathy for the occupant of it.
Indeed, it would have been a most startling unreality to have ever entered Madame Joubert\'s room and not seen Pupasse in that corner, on that stool, her tall figure shooting up like a post, until her tall, pointed bonnet d\' ane came within an inch or two of the ceiling. It was her hoop-skirt that best testified to her height. It was the period of those funnel-shaped hoop-skirts that spread out with such nice mathematical proportions, from the waist down, that it seemed they must have emanated from the brains of astronomers, like the orbits, and diameters, and other things belonging to the heavenly bodies. Pupasse could not have come within three feet of the wall with her hoop-skirt distended. To have forced matters was not to be thought of an instant. So even in her greatest grief and indignation, she had to pause before the three-legged black stool, and gather up steel after steel of her circumference in her hands behind, until her calico skirt careened and flattened; and so she could manage to accommodate herself to the limited space of her punishment, the circles drooping far over her feet as she stood there, looking like the costumed stick of a baby\'s rattle.
Her thinness continued into her face, which, unfortunately, had nothing in the way of toilet to assist it. Two little black eyes fixed in the sides of a mere fence of a nose, and a mouth with the shape and expression of all mouths made to go over sharp-pointed teeth planted very far apart; the smallest amount possible of fine, dry, black hair—a perfect rat-tail when it was plaited in one, as almost all wore their hair. But sometimes Pupasse took it into her head to plait it in two braids, as none but the thick-haired ventured to wear it. As the little girls said, it was a petition to Heaven for "eau Quinquina." When Marcelite, the hair-dresser, came at her regular periods to visit the hair of the boarders, she would make an effort with Pupasse, plaiting her hundred hairs in a ten-strand braid. The effect was a half yard of black worsted galloon; nothing more, or better. Had Pupasse possessed as many heads as the hydra, she could have "coiffe\'d" them all with fools\' caps during one morning\'s recitations. She entirely monopolized the "Daily Bee." Madame Joubert was forced to borrow from "madame" the stale weekly "Courrier des Etats-Unis" for the rest of the room. From grammar, through sacred history, arithmetic, geography, mythology, down to dictation, Pupasse could pile up an accumulation of penitences that would have tasked the limits of the current day had not recreation been wisely set as a term which disbarred, by proscription, previous offenses. But even after recreation, with that day\'s lessons safely out, punished and expiated, Pupasse\'s doom seemed scarcely lightened; there was still a whole criminal code of conduct to infract. The only difference was that instead of books, slates, or copy-books, leathern medals, bearing various legends and mottos, were hung around her neck—a travestied decoration worse than the books for humiliation.
The "abécédaires," their torment for the day over, thankful for any distraction from the next day\'s lessons, and eager for any relief from the intolerable ennui of goodness, were thankful enough now for Pupasse. They naturally watched her in preference to Madame Joubert, holding their books and slates quite cunningly to hide their faces. Pupasse had not only the genius, but that which sometimes fails genius, the means for grimacing: little eyes, long nose, foolish mouth, and pointed tongue. And she was so amusing, when Madame Joubert\'s head was turned, that the little girls, being young and innocent, would forget themselves and all burst out laughing. It sounded like a flight of singing birds through the hot, close, stupid little room; but not so to Madame Joubert.
"Young ladies! But what does this mean?"
And, terror-stricken, the innocents would call out with one voice, "It\'s Pupasse, madame! It\'s Pupasse who made us laugh!" There was nothing but fools\' caps to be gained by prevaricating, and there was frequently nothing less gained by confession. And oh, the wails and the sobs as the innocents would be stood up, one by one, in their places! Even the pigtails at the backs of their little heads were convulsed with grief. Oh, how they hated Pupasse then! When their bonnes came for them at three o\'clock,—washing their tear-stained faces at the cistern before daring to take them through the streets,—how passionately they would cry out, the tears breaking afresh into the wet handkerchiefs:
"It\'s that Pupasse! It\'s that vilaine Pupasse!"
To Pupasse herself would be meted out that "peine forte et dure," that acme of humiliation and disgrace, so intensely horrible that many a little girl in that room solemnly averred and believed she would kill herself before submitting to it. Pupasse\'s voluminous calico skirt would be gathered up by the hem and tied up over her head! Oh, the horrible monstrosity on the stool in the corner then! There were no eyes in that room that had any desire to look upon it. And the cries and the "Quelle injustice!" that fell on the ears then from the hidden feelings had all the weirdness of the unseen, but heard. And all the other girls in the room, in fear and trembling, would begin to move their lips in a perfect whirlwind of study, or write violently on their slates, or begin at that very instant to rule off their copy-books for the next day\'s verb.
Pupasse—her name was Marie Pupasse but no one thought of calling her anything but Pupasse, with emphasis on the first syllable and sibilance on the last—had no parents only a grandmother, to describe whom, all that is necessary to say is that she was as short as Pupasse was tall, and that her face resembled nothing so much as a little yellow apple shriveling from decay. The old lady came but once a week, to fetch Pupasse fresh clothes, and a great brown paper bag of nice things to eat. There was no boarder in the school who received handsomer bags of cake and fruit than Pupasse. And although, not two hours before, a girl might have been foremost in the shrill cry, "It is Pupasse who made the noise! It is Pupasse who made me laugh!" there was nothing in that paper bag reserved even from such a one. When the girl herself with native delicacy would, under the circumstances, judge it discreet to refuse, Pupasse would plead, "Oh, but take it to give me pleasure!" And if still the refusal continued, Pupasse would take her bag and go into the summer-house in the corner of the garden, and cry until the unforgiving one would relent. But the first offering of the bag was invariably to the stern dispenser of fools\' caps and the unnamed humiliation of the reversed skirt: Madame Joubert.
Pupasse was in the fifth class. The sixth—the abécédaires—was the lowest in the school. Green was the color of the fifth; white—innocence—of the abécédaires. Exhibition after exhibition, the same green sash and green ribbons appeared on Pupasse\'s white muslin, the white muslin getting longer and longer every year, trying to keep up with her phenomenal growth; and always, from all over the room, buzzed the audience\'s suppressed merriment at Pupasse\'s appearance in the ranks of the little ones of nine and ten. It was that very merriment that brought about the greatest change in the Institute St. Denis. The sitting order of the classes was reversed. The first class—the graduates—went up to the top step of the estrade; and the little ones put on the lowest, behind the pianos. The graduates grumbled that it was not comme il faut to have young ladies of their position stepping like camels up and down those great steps; and the little girls said it was a shame to hide them behind the pianos after their mamas had taken so much pains to make them look pretty. But madame said—going also to natural history for her comparison—that one must be a rhinoceros to continue the former routine.
Religion cannot be kept waiting forever on the intelligence. It was always in the fourth class that the first communion was made; that is, when the girls stayed one year in each class. But Pupasse had spent three years in the sixth class, and had already been four in the fifth, and Madame Joubert felt that longer delay would be disrespectful to the good Lord. It was true that Pupasse could not yet distinguish the ten commandments from the seven capital sins, and still would answer that Jeanne d\'Arc was the foundress of the "Little Sisters of the Poor." But, as Madame Joubert always said in the little address she made to the catechism class every year before handing it over to Father Dolomier, God judged from the heart, and not from the mind.
Father Dolomier—from his face he would have been an able contestant of bonnets d\'ane with Pupasse, if subjected to Madame Joubert\'s discipline—evidently had the same method of judging as God, although the catechism class said they could dance a waltz on the end of his long nose without his perceiving it.
There is always a little air of mystery about the first communion: not that there is any in reality, but the little ones assume it to render themselves important. The going to early mass, the holding their dog-eared catechisms as if they were relics, the instruction from the priest, even if he were only old Father Dolomier—it all put such a little air of devotion into their faces that it imposed (as it did every year) upon their companions, which was a vastly gratifying effect. No matter how young and innocent she may be, a woman\'s devotion always seems to have two aims—God and her own sex.
The week of retreat came. Oh, the week of retreat! That was the bonne bouche of it all, for themselves and for the others. It was the same every year. By the time the week of retreat arrived, interest and mystery had been frothed to the point of indiscretion; so that the little girls would stand on tiptoe to peep through the shutters at the postulants inside, and even the larger girls, to whom first communion was a thing of an infantile past, would condescend to listen to............