Eleanor and Franklin (19 page)

Challenged, Eleanor began to seek points Mlle. Souvestre had not made, and felt that it was even more satisfactory to come up with an idea that she had not found in the assigned reading. She glowed when Mlle. Souvestre returned a paper with the comment “well thought out,” even if she added, “but you have forgotten this or that point.”

Beatrice Webb was less impressed by Mlle. Souvestre as a thinker. She lamented Mademoiselle's reliance on the sparks of intuition rather than the rigors of scientific method in arriving at social judgments. Like her father, Mlle. Souvestre was primarily a moralist in politics,
and she was concerned more with social justice than with social analysis. In this regard she strengthened Eleanor's disposition toward a social idealism based on intuitive reason and the promptings of the heart rather than intellectual analysis.

In what did Mlle. Souvestre succeed, a pupil later asked, and answered her own question—“in exciting, in amusing, in passionately interesting the intellect, in putting such a salt and savour into life, that it seemed as if we could never think anything dull again.”

Mlle. Souvestre's fervent concern with public affairs and politics was another novelty for Eleanor; at Grandma Hall's there had been fashionable indifference. Uncle Ted's exploits in Cuba, his progress to the governorship, the vice presidency, and presidency were, of course, discussed at Tivoli, but as part of the family chronicle, not because they were national events. Politics, so far as the women were concerned, was still strictly the business of the men, as it had been in Grandfather Hall's day. Mlle. Souvestre, on the other hand, was “a radical free thinker,” an intimate of the group that surrounded Frederic Harrison, leader of the English Positivists, who was a staunch supporter of trade unionism and an advocate of the “religion of humanity.”

The headmistress was sensationally different from the devout Christians who directed the English public schools in her attitude toward religion: she called herself an atheist. That shocked Eleanor. If Grandma Hall had had the slightest inkling of this, she would surely have summoned Eleanor home immediately, regardless of Auntie Bye's devotion to the Frenchwoman.

As Mlle. Souvestre explained it, she could not comprehend a God who occupied Himself with the insignificant doings of individual men, and she considered pathetic the belief that He passed out rewards for good behavior and punishment for bad. Right should be done for its own sake; only the weak needed religion. These views were held by a large body of anticlerical opinion on the continent, but they were new and startling to Eleanor.

Did Christians do right only because of the rewards that were promised in heaven? Eleanor puzzled over this for many years, and in the end concluded that the charge was meaningless so far as her own feeling about God was concerned. “I was too young then to come back with the obvious retort that making those around you happy makes you happy yourself and, therefore, you are seeking a reward just as much as if you were asking for your reward in your future life.”
¹⁴

But she also maintained that listening to Mlle. Souvestre's anticlericalism did her no harm in that it prompted her to reexamine her own beliefs. She could not accept Mlle. Souvestre's concept of a God indifferent to man and his activities on earth. Eleanor felt that God commanded what her own heart bid her do. Eleanor has “the warmest heart that I have ever encountered,” Mlle. Souvestre noted on Eleanor's first report. Religion and prayer touched mystic chords in Eleanor that bound her to her dead father and to all humanity. Mlle. Souvestre's indifference to religion did not interfere with Eleanor's enjoyment of the Passion play which Aunt Tissie took her to see or of the Christmas midnight mass that she and Burky attended with Mlle. Souvestre in Rome. She concluded, with pathetic eagerness, that the headmistress could not be an atheist “at heart for she was as much moved as we were by the music and the lights!” Beatrice Webb questioned Marie Souvestre's ability to appreciate religious feeling. Yet one of Mademoiselle's dearest friends, the French evangelist the Reverend Charles Wagner, did not consider it a violation of his friend's basic convictions to confide her soul to the hands of the Lord at her funeral in the Church “de L'oratoire Saint-Honoré.” So Eleanor may have been more discerning than Mrs. Webb in ascribing some religious sentiment to Mlle. Souvestre.

While Marie Souvestre's agnosticism produced no answering echo in Eleanor, the elder woman's “uncompromising sense of truth”—Beatrice Webb called it her “veracity”—and her “intolerance of pettiness and sham” did. In later years Eleanor did not hesitate to disagree with church or bishop when their actions or words seemed to conflict with Christian spirit or when religious institutions lent support to cruelty, prejudice, and human degradation.

Although Allenswood was notably emancipated if measured against other finishing schools, it was totally innocent in regard to preparing young ladies to deal with the world of men. Except for a few elderly gentlemen teachers, the girls were as cloistered as in a nunnery. On one occasion when Eleanor and Audrey Hartcup, then two of the oldest girls at the school, went into the library to say good night to Mlle. Souvestre, they found her in conversation with Mlle. Samaia and the older brother of one of their classmates. “Mlle. Samaia threw up her hands in horror and shooed us out!” The next day Eleanor and Audrey cornered her and tried to make her understand the absurdity of such squeamishness in view of “how freely we mixed with members of
the opposite sex—when at home.” If Eleanor, one of the most proper of young ladies, felt that Mlle. Samaia was being overly protective, it must have indeed been a cloistered existence.

Mlle. Souvestre was the most influential figure in Eleanor's early years, second only to her father. Headmistress and pupil were strongly drawn to each other. Marie Souvestre, like Eleanor, had been very attached to her father, who had died when she was quite young, and there were other bonds between the two. Mlle. Souvestre admitted to having a special feeling for Americans, and then there was the family tie. “Believe me,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote Mrs. Hall, “as long as Eleanor will stay with me I shall bear her an almost maternal feeling, first because I am devoted to her aunt, Mrs. Cowles, and also because I have known both the parents she was unfortunate enough to lose.” But according to Corinne, Eleanor's younger cousin whose first year at Allenswood overlapped Eleanor's last and who also gained a preferred place in the affections of the school's headmistress, the crux of the relationship was Mademoiselle's realization that “she could give a great deal to that really remarkable, sad young girl.”

The headmistress' motherly solicitude for Eleanor extended to her clothes, her health, her grooming. She was outraged by Eleanor's made-over dresses but hesitated to say so at first because she was afraid of hurting the sensitive girl. During Eleanor's second year at Allenswood, however, when she and Burky were spending the between-year holiday with a French family in order to improve their French, Mlle. Souvestre, who was also in Paris, finally expressed herself on the subject of Eleanor's clothes. Mlle. Samaia was directed to take Eleanor to a dressmaker, and the dark red gown that was made for her gave Eleanor as much pleasure as if it had come from the most fashionable house in Paris. “I can well remember this red dress,” a schoolmate recalled more than sixty-five years later.

Mlle. Samaia also undertook to break Eleanor of the habit of biting her fingernails. She had little success until one day when Eleanor was rereading her father's letters and came to the passage that admonished her to take care of her personal appearance. It hit home, and from that day forward, she said, she let her nails grow.

Her grandmother had alerted the school to her delicate health. “You would enjoy seeing her so well, so rested, so ready for all out-of-door exercises,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote Mrs. Hall. “She does not any more suffer of the complaints you told me about. She has a good sleep, a good appetite, is very rarely troubled with headaches and is always
ready to enjoy her life.” A year later Mlle. Souvestre again reported on Eleanor's physical condition.

She looks always very thin, delicate and often white and just the same I have rarely seen such a power of endurance. She is never unwell even when she seems so. Her appetite and sleep are excellent and she is never tired of walking and taking exercise.

Photographs of Eleanor at this period show a tall, slim, narrow-waisted girl with soft, wavy hair arranged in a pompadour and braided in the back. Her most distinctive feature was her eyes; blue, serene, and soft, in their gaze one forgot the overly prominent teeth and the slightly receding chin. Her soul, said Mlle. Souvestre, was a radiant thing, and it could be glimpsed in her eyes. Like her father, she had the faculty of concentrating all her attention and sympathy on the person she was with. “She is conscientious and affectionate,” the headmistress wrote Mrs. Hall in one of many such reports, “full of regard for others, and of a fineness of feeling truly exquisite. She desires only the good.”

Eleanor's schoolmates agreed. Burky, who felt “tired” by comparison with Eleanor, later expressed her gratitude to her for her companionship during holidays, even though “my mind and my body could not keep up with all the things you absorbed so readily and so intelligently.” Eleanor was so consistently helpful that even the girls her age looked upon her “as one of the older ones.” Avice Horn's sister Dorothy characterized Eleanor “as being entirely sophisticated, and full of self-confidence and
savoir faire
,” and Eleanor's cousin Corinne gave this picture of the position that Eleanor held at the school:

When I arrived she was “everything” at the school. She was beloved by everybody. Saturdays we were allowed a sortie into Putney which had stores where you could buy books, flowers. Young girls have crushes and you bought violets or a book and left them in the room of the girl you were idolizing. Eleanor's room every Saturday would be full of flowers because she was so admired.

Mlle. Souvestre's aim was to make her girls “cultivated women of the world,” and because she knew so many men of arts and letters in all countries she was able to give a few fortunate older pupils special advantages when she took them abroad on vacation. Eleanor was one of those chosen for this privilege.

“If you have no objection to this plan,” she wrote Mrs. Hall in February, 1901, “I am thinking of taking her with me to Florence during the Easter holiday. It will be short but I think she may nevertheless derive some benefit of a fortnight in Italy and she is very eager to come with me.”

All the practical details of the journey were turned over to the sixteen-year-old girl. Eleanor packed for both of them, looked up train schedules, secured the tickets, arranged for the hansoms and porters. She loved every part of her assignment, and traveling with Mlle. Souvestre was a “revelation” to her: eating native dishes, drinking the
vin du pays
(diluted, of course, with water), being with the people of the country, not one's countrymen. She learned the pleasures of a meal of wine, cheese, bread, and coffee, and the virtue of flexibility in travel; of revising plans in order to see a friend or a church or a painting. In France they were entertained by M. Ribot, a former prime minister. In Alassio they called on Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the novelist. In Florence they stayed with a painter who was doing a gigantic church mural of the Last Supper. While in Florence Mlle. Souvestre told Eleanor to take her Baedeker and go through the sublime city street by street, church by church; “Florence is worth it,” said Mlle. Souvestre. And “so, 16 years old, keener than I have probably ever been since and more alive to beauty, I sallied forth to see Florence alone.”
¹⁵
In addition to the excitement and joy of discovery, there was the pleasure of discussing everything she had seen with Mlle. Souvestre afterward. “It is impossible to wish for one self a more delightful companion in traveling,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote Mrs. Hall. “She is never tired, never out of sorts, never without a keen interest in all that she sees.”
¹⁶

On her way back to England Eleanor stopped in Paris, where she wanted to get gifts. Like her father, she took pleasure in giving, and also like him she tried to find “just the thing” which would make the recipient feel loved and valued. A list of those to receive presents started with her family:

Maude's baby
[Maude was Mrs. Larry Waterbury]

Joe's baby
[her Uncle Eddie Hall had married the beautiful Josie Zabriskie]

Pussie

Cherub
[Hall]

Grandma

Vallie

Tissie
[Mrs. Stanley Mortimer]

Cousin Susie
[Mrs. Henry Parish]

It also included teachers and her closest school friends, and ended with the redoubtable Madeleine, who had caused her so much grief.

In Paris she ran into the Newbold family, whose Hyde Park estate bordered on that of the Roosevelts'. Mlle. Souvestre did not think Eleanor needed to be chaperoned, and the Newbolds promptly reported to Grandma Hall that they had seen Eleanor in Paris alone. Eleanor worried about her grandmother's reaction to this news; she was to go back to the United States in July and she wanted desperately to return to Allenswood in September. “I sincerely hope she may be able to do that,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote to Mrs. Hall. “I am sure another year of a regular and studious life will be in every respect mentally and physically beneficial. Her health though excellent is perhaps not yet settled enough to make it desirable for her to face all the irregularities of a society life. . . . She is very desirous of seeing you and is often anxious for you, now that so many of your daughters are married and away.” (Tissie spent a good part of the year abroad; Maude had married Larry Waterbury, the famous polo player; and Pussie, although still unmarried, was totally preoccupied with herself.)