It was under these terrific impressions that Pitou entered Pleux. He had taken a quarter of an hour to traverse the distance between the great gate at the Abbé Fortier’s and the entrance to this street, and yet it was scarcely three hundred yards.
At that moment the church clock struck one; he then perceived that his final conversation with the Abbé Fortier and the slowness with which he had walked had delayed him in all sixty minutes, and that consequently he was half an hour later than the time at which no more dinner was to be had in Aunt Angélique’s abode.
We have already said that such was the salutary restraint which Aunt Angélique had added to his being kept in school, and on the wild ramblings of her nephew; it was thus that in the course of a year she managed to economize some sixty dinners at the expense of her poor nephew’s stomach.
But this time, that which rendered more uneasy the retarded schoolboy was not the loss of his aunt’s meagre dinner, although his breakfast had been meagre enough, for his heart was too full to allow him to perceive the emptiness of his stomach.
There is a frightful torment, well known to a student, however perverse he may be, and this is the illegitimate hiding in some retired corner, after being expelled from college; it is the definitive and compelled holiday which he is constrained to take advantage of, while his fellowstudents pass by him with their books and writings under their arm, proceeding to their daily task. That college, formerly so hated, then assumes a most desirable form; the scholar occupies his mind with the great affairs of themes and exercises, to which he before so little directed his attention, and which are being proceeded with in his absence. There is a great similarity between a pupil so expelled by his professor and a man who has been excommunicated for his impiety, and who no longer has a right to enter the church, although burning with desire to hear a mass.
And this was why, the nearer he approached his aunt’s house, his residence in that house appeared the more frightful to poor Pitou. And this was why, for the first time in his life, his imagination pictured to him the school as a terrestrial paradise, from which the Abbé Fortier, as the exterminating angel, had driven him forth, with his cat-o’-nine-tails wielded as a flaming sword.
But yet, slowly as he walked, and although he halted at every ten steps,—halts which became still longer as he approached nearer,—he could not avoid at last reaching the threshold of that most formidable house. Pitou then crossed the threshold with shuffling feet, and mechanically rubbing his hand on the seam of his nether garment.
“Ah, Aunt Angélique, I am really very sick,” said he, in order to stop her raillery or her reproaches, and perhaps also to induce her to pity him, poor boy.
“Pshaw!” said Angélique. “I well know what your sickness is; and it would be cured at once by putting back the hands of the clock an hour and a half.”
“Oh, good heavens, no!” cried Pitou; “for I am not hungry.”
Aunt Angélique was surprised and almost anxious. Sickness equally alarms affectionate mothers and crabbed stepmothers,—affectionate mothers from the dangers caused by sickness, and stepmothers from the heavy pulls it makes upon their purse.
“Well, what is the matter? Come, now, speak out at once,” said the old maid.
On hearing these words, which were, however, pronounced without any very tender sympathy, Ange Pitou burst into tears; and it must be acknowledged that the wry faces he made when proceeding from complaints to tears were the most terrifically ugly wry faces that could be seen.
“Oh, my good Aunt,” cried he, sobbing, “a great misfortune has happened to me!”
“And what is it?” asked the old maid.
“The Abbé Fortier has sent me away,” replied Ange, sobbing so violently that he was scarcely intelligible.
“Sent you away?” repeated Mademoiselle Angélique, as if she had not perfectly comprehended what he said.
“Yes, Aunt.”
“And from where has he sent you!”
“From the school.”