Becoming Jane Eyre Read Online Free Page B

bedside, she has a vision of her French teacher, Monsieur H. She sees him striding fast into the classroom, waving a paper in his hands with that enthusiasm and certainty in his judgment. He draws himself up, staring at her with his intense gaze. She realizes that the paper he holds is hers. He reads from it in his expressive voice, adjusting his glasses. Will he commend it or heap coals of recrimination on her head?
    She has written about Napoleon in the freedom of a language that increasingly belongs to her teacher. It is a language of head and heart, of glitter and gleam, a language that she is distanced from and yet now closer to than any other, because of him, a language of enchantment: French.
    He trumpets, “ Ecoutez! ” and obtains in an instant the complete attention of a roomful of girls in all their youthful giddiness. “Now listen to this. Observe the range, the promise here. This is lively writing. Pay attention, girls—you’ll hear something different, something rare.”
    She is not used to compliments. She feels her cheeks flush with pleasure. He has recognized her gift. Her body spins. The whole classroom, with its blackboard, its wooden desks, and its stolid Belgian pupils, swims around her.

    She remembers the vacillating spring weather: bright one day and wet the next. As she walked in the garden, how brightly the beds flowered, how darkly the high wall between the boys’ and the girls’ school cast its shadow on the grass, how sweetly the sounds of the city came to her, like the constant murmur of the sea. How quickly she and Emily learned French, swallowing it down with great joyous gulps until their Master said one day, “Voilà le Français gagné!”
    She remembers his wife, lying flushed, happy, and exhausted in her canopied bed, smiling at her, as she hesitated at the door with her bouquet of roses clutched in her hand. She welcomed her into the room, patting the bed to invite her to sit close beside her, to admire the new baby she held in her arms. A rush of tears came into her eyes at the sight of the tiny pink creature.
    “Would you like to hold him?” the wife asked, but Charlotte didn’t dare.
    “Yes, yes,” the new mother had insisted, and thrust the little bundle like an offering into her shaking hands. Would she ever carry a baby within her? She lifted the warm infant and kissed his head, inhaling his scent. With this small, helpless being in her arms, she thought quite peculiarly that she would be willing to do anything, anything, to protect this child, if she was called upon to, if he was dependent on her care.
    And her teacher, her Master. He seemed in a feverish state during those early days, rushing from one class to the next in his savage-looking old coat or his old-fashioned slouch hat, arriving sometimes unexpectedly in the early morning as she walked alone in the garden.
    “Mademoiselle est bien matinale,” he would say, pressing her hand in greeting and offering his arm. They walked together under the blossoming fruit trees, the apple, the pear, and the cherry, strolling among the spring flowers, daffodils, tulips, primroses, and fragrant herbs.
    In the dim light of her father’s room, she recalls the twilight hour and the fluttering of the young girls in muslin dresses like moths in the gloaming between the shadowy trees. She watched him speak with the girls and realized he was not to them what he was to her.
    They talked of many things, speaking in French freely in a way she had done with her brother, but here with new words that had no childhood connotations. As then, so now, she felt free. I cannot fall in love with him, an older and married man, she had thought.
    Their conversation was of the most innocent, she considers, even now, and yet compelling. They had discussed books, her writing, French literature. Her Master had talked at length of the three unities: place, time, and dramatic action. “The drama must take place offstage, you see. So much more can be