MICHEL TOURNIER
251
and delicious immaturity. I'm sure I actually heard him, in his own
voice , murmur in a tone of offended modesty, this answer to a friend
who had asked him if all these young girls didn't sometimes ex–
asperate him:
"Be quiet! They are three quarters of'my life!" And out of
timidity he was lying about the fourth part which undoubtedly also
belonged to his little girls .
How old would Blandine have been? Eleven, perhaps, or
twelve at the most. But I knew instinctively that puberty had not yet
made her bleed . I could see it in a hundred unmistakable details : a
kind of unself-conscious candor in her movements, the scars on her
round and innocent knees, and certain gestures, like putting the sole
of her right foot crookedly on top of her left if she was waiting or was
bored-a characteristic of boys as well as girls, but one which is
typically prepubescent.
Oh, don't laugh! I'm not so simple as to confuse immaturity
with innocence! Blandine was wily as they come, and I was to learn
this in a rather cutting way. It is my opinion that a child, because it
isn't distracted or blinded by sexual or emotional stirrings , is
sometimes capable of being more cunning than an adolescent wrest–
ling with all his moods . It is not unusual for puberty to turn a bright
and lively child into an awkward goose. More than anything else,
Blandine was incredibly feminine . I have often had occasion to
observe this exquisite precociousness in young girls, sometimes
young enough to be virtually babies. At barely two years old some of
them know that a man is a man and this makes them behave in a
way you could only call coquettish. By comparison, little boys re–
main witless idiots-except of course where their mothers are con–
cerned-until the age of their first emission. Blandine had taken
possession of the house, the garden, and of me with imperial ease,
and I let myself slip into a situation which had all the flavor of a
fairy-tale.
Then a day came when she did not appear. And another day.
For an entire week I anxiously awaited her. My only consolation
was to listen to the chattering in the playground, telling myself that
her voice was part of it. The weekend was all the more gloomy
because the weather was so superb. On the Monday, I did the
clumsy, stupid thing I had been trying to avoid for a week: laying
myself open to the gossip of the whole district, I went to wait for her
at the school gate .
She came straight up to me and simply said:
"Daddy wants to see you . "
