Madeleine: In the Beginning
I have always wanted to learn, felt the desire to suck up information from the depths of books, wanted to do something with my life. At the boarding school where I grew up, parentless, the pitied orphan, I remember hiding behind doorways and under staircases in order to catch a spattering of written words while the other girls were marched off to mass on Sunday mornings, even waking up early to sneak to my hiding spot before the nuns could rouse me out of bed…
I would do what I could to get my hands on books, too, even stealing some from one of the massive, or so they seemed to me then, libraries of the school. Homer, Virgil, Voltaire, Shakespeare…Slowly I taught myself the Latin and English I could. Whatever the school would not let me learn, I would find a way to know.
I always knew that I had to get away someday, away from the closed-in order of that place; and God help me if I would do it by resigning to the choices Fate had given me: seamstress, maid, wife. I would be something more. And so I set my mind on La Sorbonne, a name, a place, a building that to me represented the height of all learning and everything I wanted. It didn't matter that for all intents and purposes it was an impossible goal, I swore I would reach it.
And so when I was sixteen I did a stupid, impulsive thing: I ran. Away from that boarding school, away from the nuns who done nothing but restrict me, away from the rotting city of Romaine, and I made for the one place that seems to instinctively draw weary travelers: Paris.