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Updated: June 22, 2025
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.
They all recognized that; they were reasonable, as they assured her. A crisis quickens the wits. They heard the cathedral clock strike the quarter to three. They whispered, suggested, argued bunched in the farthest corner from Pupasse. "Console yourself, Pupasse! We will help you, Pupasse! Say no more about it! We will help you!" A delegate was sent to say that.
Madame Joubert put them through the rehearsal, a most important part of the preparation, almost as important as catechism how to enter the church, how to hold the candle, how to advance, how to kneel, retire everything, in fact. Only one day more, the quietest, most devotional day of all. Pupasse lost her sins! Of course every year the same accident happened to some one.
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' âne came within an inch or two of the ceiling. It was her hoop-skirt that best testified to her height.
"Irregular verbs give me one word, Madame Joubert; only one word!" "That " "Irregular verbs, that irregular verbs, that " "See here, Pupasse; you do not know that lesson any more than a cat does" Madame Joubert's favorite comparison. "Yes, I do, Madame Joubert! Yes, I do!" "Silence!" "But, Madame Joubert " "Will you be silent!" "Yes, Madame Joubert; only "
That little school parlor had been the stage for so many scenes! Madame Joubert detested acting the comedy, as she called it. There was nothing she punished with more pleasure up in her room. And yet "Pupasse, ma fille, give me your grammar." The old battered, primitive book was gotten out of the bag, the string still tied between the leaves for convenience in hanging around the neck.
There was a little scene in the parlor: Pupasse, all dressed in black, with her bag of primary books in her hand, ready and eager to get back to her classes and fools' caps; madame, hesitating between her interests and her fear of ridicule; Madame Joubert, between her loyalty to school and her conscience. Pupasse the only one free and untrammeled, simple and direct.
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.
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!
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.
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