Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Part II · Chapter 2 1 (2/2)

No need to say that that was the end of the watch-keeping, and that it gave a final blow to the worrying of the newcomers: it has never been renewed.

It surely was also a blow to Girardot’s authority, and he resented it very much. He regarded our form, and me especially, with great dislike (the roundabout affair had been reported to him), and he manifested it at every opportunity.

During the first winter, I was a frequent inmate of the hospital. After suffering from typhoid fever, during which the director and the doctor bestowed on me a really parental care, I had very bad and persistently recurring gastric attacks. Girardot, as he made his daily rounds of the hospital, seeing me so often there, began to say to me every morning, half jokingly, in French, “Here is a young man who is as healthy as the New Bridge, and loiters in the hospital.” Once or twice I replied jestingly, but at last, seeing malice in this constant repetition, I lost patience and grew very angry.

“How dare you say that?” I exclaimed. “I shall ask the doctor to forbid your entering this room,” and so on.

Girardot recoiled two steps; his dark eyes glittered, his thin lip became still thinner. At last he said, “I have offended you, have I? Well, we have in the hall two artillery guns: shall we have a duel?”

“I don’t make jokes, and I tell you that I shall bear no more of your insinuations,” I continued.

He did not repeat his joke, but regarded me with even more dislike than before.

Everyone spoke of Girardot’s dislike for me; but I paid no attention to it, and probably increased it by my indifference. For full eighteen months he refused to give me the epaulets, which were usually given to newly entered boys after one or two months’ stay at the school, when they had learned some of the rudiments of military drill; but I felt quite happy without that military decoration. At last, an officer⁠—the best teacher of drill in the school, a man simply enamored of drill⁠—volunteered to teach me; and when he saw me performing all the tricks to his entire satisfaction, he undertook to introduce me to Girardot. The Colonel refused again, twice in succession, so that the officer took it as a personal offense; and when the director of the corps once asked him why I had no epaulets yet, he bluntly answered, “The boy is all right; it is the Colonel who does not want him;” whereupon, probably after a remark of the director, Girardot himself asked to examine me again, and gave me the epaulets that very day.

But the Colonel’s influence was rapidly vanishing. The whole character of the school was changing. For twenty years Girardot had realized his ideal, which was to have the boys nicely combed, curled, and girlish looking, and to send to the court pages as refined as courtiers of Louis XIV. Whether they learned or not, he cared little; his favorites were those whose clothes-baskets were best filled with all sorts of nailbrushes and scent bottles, whose “private” uniform (which could be put on when we went home on Sundays) was of the best make, and who knew how to make the most elegant salut oblique. Formerly, when Girardot had held rehearsals of court ceremonies, wrapping up a page in a striped red cotton cover taken from one of our beds, in order that he might represent the Empress at a baisemain, the boys almost religiously approached the imaginary Empress, seriously performed the ceremony of kissing the hand, and retired with a most elegant oblique bow; but now, though they were very elegant at court, they would perform at the rehearsals such bearlike bows that all roared with laughter, while Girardot was simply raging. Formerly, the younger boys who had been taken to a court levee, and had been curled for that purpose, used to keep their curls as long as they would last; now, on returning from the palace, they hurried to put their heads under the cold-water tap, to get rid of the curls. An effeminate appearance was laughed at. To be sent to a levee, to stand there as a decoration, was now considered a drudgery rather than a favor. And when the small boys who were occasionally taken to the palace to play with the little grand dukes remarked that one of the latter used, in some game, to make a hard whip out of his handkerchief, and use it freely, one of our boys did the same, and so whipped the grand duke that he cried. Girardot was terrified, while the old Sebastopol admiral who was tutor of the grand duke only praised our boy.

A new spirit, studious and serious, developed in the corps, as in all other schools. In former years, the pages, being sure that in one way or another they would get the necessary marks for being promoted officers of the guard, spent the first years in the school hardly learning at all, and only began to study more or less in the last two forms; now the lower forms learned very well. The moral tone also became quite different from what it was a few years before. Oriental amusements were looked upon with disgust, and an attempt or two to revert to old manners resulted in scandals which reached the St. Petersburg drawing-rooms. Girardot was dismissed. He was only allowed to retain his bachelor apartment in the building of the corps, and we often saw him afterward, wrapped in his long military cloak, pacing along, plunged in reflections⁠—sad, I suppose, because he could not but condemn the new spirit which rapidly developed in the corps of pages.