CHAPTER SIX

When Emma was thirteen, her father had taken her into Rouen and entered her at the church for schooling. At first, she enjoyed the company of the nuns, who entertained her. She played very little at playtime. She knew her lessons well, and it was always she who answered the most difficult questions in class. The religious stories and the pictures alongside charmed her. The songs she learned in the music lessons were all about faith and the religious stories she was told in school.

She wept a great deal for a few days when her mother died. She kept a piece of her mother's hair with her to remember. When she wrote letters home to her father, full of sadness, she asked that when she died she would be buried with her mother. Her father thought she must be ill, and came to see her. Emma soon grew distant, paying little attention to her lessons. She loved the church for its flowers, music for the song's words, poems for its emotional language, and began to hate hearing the lessons of the church, and the rules that went along. When her father took her away, no one missed her when she left.

Home once more, Emma at first enjoyed commanding the servants, but she soon grew tired of the country and wanted to return to the church again. At the time of Charles' first appearance at Les Bertaux, Emma was tired of the world; she believed she had nothing more to learn and nothing more to feel.

Then, she realized that she would get nervous if Charles was around. She believed that, perhaps, she could fall in love with this man, although she knew that the peacefulness of her present life could never be the happiness she dreamed of.

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