The Italian Woman

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In her apartments at the castle of Plessis-les-Tours a little girl knelt on a window seat and looked disconsolately out on the sunlit grounds. The sunshine out there, she felt, made the castle itself more gloomy by contrast. She hated the place.

‘What am I,’ she said aloud, ‘but a prisoner?’

The lady who was stitching industriously at her embroidery, her back to the window and to the little girl, that the best of the light might fall on her work, clicked her tongue in answer. She had no wish to enter into a discussion of her wrongs with Jeanne, for although the child was only twelve years old, her tongue was so quick that even her tutor had learned not to enter lightly into wordy battles with her, since, with her logic and quick wits, Jeanne had a way of coming out of such encounters victorious. As for Madame de Silly, the Baillive of Caen and governess of Jeanne, she knew herself no match for the child when it came to an argument.

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