five
when she died. That was a bad thing for us all. I had a tall brother,
who was white as a sheet, with a yellow beard--and good! you have no
idea. Everybody loved him. They gave him all sorts of names. Some called
him Boda--why, I don't know. Others called him Jesus Christ. Ah! he was
a worker, he was! It didn't make any difference to him that his health
was good for nothing; at daybreak he was always at his loom--for we were
weavers, you must know--and he never put his shuttle down till night.
And honest, too, if you knew! People came from all about to bring him
their yarn, and without weighing it, too. He was a great friend of the
schoolmaster, and he used to write the _mottoes_ for the carnival. My
father, he was a different sort: he'd work for a moment, or an hour, you
know, and then he'd go off into the fields--and when he came home he'd
beat us, and beat us hard. He was like a madman; they said it was
because he was consumptive. It was lucky my brother was there: he used
to prevent my second sister from pulling my hair and hurting me, because
she was jealous. He always took me by the hand to go and see them play
skittles. In fact, he supported the family all alone. For my first
communion he had the bells rung! Ah! he did a heap of work so that I
should be like the others, in a little white dress with flounces and a
little bag in my hand, such as they used to carry in those days. I
didn't have any cap: I remember making myself a pretty little wreath of
ribbons and the white pith you pull off when you strip reeds; there was
lots of it in the places where we used to put the hemp to soak. That was
one of my great days--that and the drawing lots for the pigs at
Christmas--and the days when I went to help them tie up the vines; that
was in June, you know. We had a little vineyard near Saint Hilaire.
There was one very hard year in those days--do you remember it,
mademoiselle?--the long frost of 1828 that ruined everything. It
extended as far as Dijon and farther, too--people had to make bread from
bran. My brother nearly killed himself with work. Father, who was always
out of doors tramping about the fields, sometimes brought home a few
mushrooms. It was pretty bad, all the same; we were hungry oftener than
anything else. When I was out in the fields myself, I'd look around to
see if anyone could see me, and then I'd crawl along softly on my knees,
and when I was under a cow, I'd take off one of my sabots and begin to