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There was fighting all through the night in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, on the Boulevards where they had been shot at, and at the Porte St. Denis. Barricades began to be fixed. Everyone was very grave now; the EXTERNES went away, but no one came to fetch me, so I had to stay. No lessons could go on.
Moreover, there was good reason to expect it would ring all the afternoon, since about one hundred externes were yet to arrive in carriages or fiacres: nor could it be expected to rest during the evening, when parents and friends would gather thronging to the play.
As Graham sat there waiting, an inner door opened and a number of children came trooping out; they were the externes, children of the bourgeois class for the most part, who came to school twice a-day at the convent; indeed they were the only pupils, the building not being large enough to accommodate boarders.
Doubtless at high noon, in the broad, vulgar middle of the day, when Madame Beck's large school turned out rampant, and externes and pensionnaires were spread abroad, vying with the denizens of the boys' college close at hand, in the brazen exercise of their lungs and limbs doubtless then the garden was a trite, trodden-down place enough.
But at sunset or the hour of salut, when the externes were gone home, and the boarders quiet at their studies; pleasant was it then to stray down the peaceful alleys, and hear the bells of St. Jean Baptiste peal out with their sweet, soft, exalted sound.
From one to two, there was fancy- work a pupil reading aloud some light literature in each room; from two to four, lessons again. At four, the externes left; and the remaining girls dined in the refectoire, M. and Madame Heger presiding. From five to six there was recreation, from six to seven, preparation for lessons; and, after that succeeded the lecture pieuse Charlotte's nightmare.
We learn, however, from the affiches that it is all in honour of 'Our Lady of Hope, that the externes from one school parade the streets to-day, wearing wreaths and carrying banners and crowns of flowers; that others bear aloft the 'cipher of Mary, the banner of the Immaculate Conception, baskets of roses, oriflammes, &c.; that twenty grown-up men parade the town with the 'banner of the Sacred Heart, and that a party of young ladies, in white dresses fringed with gold, brave the heat and the dust, and crowd to do honour to the 'Queen of Angels. A multitude with streamers and banners, a confusion of colour and gilding, passing to and from the churches all day; and at night, fire balloons, feu d'artifice, open theatres, and 'general joy.
Vauquer took boarders who came for their meals; but these externes usually only came to dinner, for which they paid thirty francs a month. At the time when this story begins, the lodging-house contained seven inmates. The best rooms in the house were on the first story, Mme. Vauquer herself occupying the least important, while the rest were let to a Mme.
I was told, too, that neither masters nor teachers were found fault with in that establishment; yet both masters and teachers were often changed: they vanished and others filled their places, none could well explain how. The establishment was both a pensionnat and an externat: the externes or day-pupils exceeded one hundred in number; the boarders were about a score.
We were externes, the three of us, but we remained in general to luncheon; coming home then, late in the afternoon, with an almost sore experience of multiplicity and vivacity of contact.
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