Fermina Marquez (1911) Read Online Free PDF Page B

But in his case, it had naturally been undermined by the education he was receiving at school. Indeed, this wholly bourgeois distinction is unknown to great writers: they exalt abandoned and virtuous women indiscriminately. They even prefer to choose women as their heroines whose passions and excesses have made them famous: Medea,  Dido,  Phaedra. Occasionally,  Joanny  would   amuse  himself by   imagining grotesque parallels between these celebrated lovers and the ladies who came to tea at his mother's. The characteristics of the honest woman were ugliness, stupidity, bitchiness. By contrast, the other, the despised one, was beautiful, intelligent  and  giving.   Without  any doubt  whatsoever,   it  was primordial man in his masculinity who had established this distinction and who in his own interest had imposed it on his companion. Thus, under man's domination, the fair sex was just like a well-supervised herd, so well-trained indeed, that it had succeeded in doing its own policing and in instinctively driving all the unruly types, all the black sheep out of its ranks. Joanny did not ask himself whether this law was just or unjust, nor whether it was not in women's interests to conform to it; however,  he observed that women heeded this law, blindly duped by their eternal master, the grasping lord of the patriarchal era, the Roman husband cum manu. All in all, there was no very great difference:  "some are called subservient outside marriage and others like my mother and her friends are subservient within marriage; that is all." —Joanny was pleased with this choice of words; at fifteen, he was proud of having ideas of this sort; he thought them original and daring. At the same   time,   the   old   scruples   of the  pious  child   in   him reproached him for the irreverence towards his mother which his thoughts revealed. Certainly, Leniot's notion of the honest woman had been gravely impaired. But it survived as a central distinction  between  two modes of education.   In  the final analysis, all differences could be reduced to that. There were the properly brought-up women and there were the rest. And the basis of the attraction of girls in his eyes was precisely that they formed a third group. They still had to choose between vice and virtue and  they derived  their appeal  from  both. Fermina Marquez was a girl;  and  it was just that which disconcerted Joanny in particular: he thought he would have  
ventured everything with a young woman. Well then, yet another reason to attempt the seduction of the little South American . . .
Anyway, it would most certainly be better for him not to be in love at all. He was not for anything in the world to lapse into sentimental foolishness: repeating mawkish passages from novels; endeavouring to compose a sonnet and discovering that the sonnet of Arvers has been transcribed almost word for word; daydreaming; and all that has been achieved is to waste time. No, Joanny had to apply his full store of methodical patience, all the studious obstinacy of the model pupil to this bid at seduction. He had to be dispassionately calculating, to keep an eye on events, to watch out for opportunities . . .
Meanwhile, prep was becoming rowdy. Mr Lebrun, in a panic, was now reprimanding continuously. Joanny heard his neighbour mutter: "This idiot isn't even letting us get on quietly with our work."
"You persist in doing nothing, Mr Leniot?" asked Mr Lebrun aggressively.
"I am meditating, Sir," answered Joanny.
The entire prep group began to laugh openly. Hearing the monitor being held up to ridicule by the foremost pupil acted as the spur. A bait was organized.
"Have you quite finished talking to your neighbour, Mr Zuniga?" shouted the monitor.
"Come now Mr Montemayor!"
"What? I'm being very well behaved, Sir."
"Hey you, yes you there. Your name please."
"Juan Bernardo de Claraval Marti de la Cruz y del Milagro de la Concha."
The laughter turned