Classe de CM1
Lessons in Sainte-Clotilde
The school had no photographs or drawings on the walls.
Mathieu noticed this during his first walk-through with the directrice, Madame Aubert. Every primary school he’d taught at before — Roubaix, then a year in Lyon — had artwork pinned everywhere. Here, the walls were cream-painted plaster and there was nothing on them.
Madame Aubert walked him through the space quickly, asking about his transport from Paris, whether he’d found the house acceptable, whether he had any dietary requirements for the canteen.
He said the house was fine. He’d arrived two days before at the rented cottage at the edge of Sainte-Clotilde-sur-Nez, which was not a beautiful village by any standard: a church with scaffolding that might have been there for years, a boulangerie and a tabac, and a Mairie with a peeling tricolour.
He had unpacked his boxes, cooked pasta, and then gone to bed at nine because there was nothing else to do.
“CM1 is twenty-three children,” Madame Aubert said, referring to his class. “Eight to nine years old. You’ll find them attentive.”
She was indeed right about that. He found them unnervingly attentive on his first morning.
They sat in near-complete silence as he wrote his name on the board and explained that he was from Paris and had been teaching for four years, liked football and books about science.
They watched him.
Twenty-three children, all sitting straight, facing forward. They all stared with an expression of concentrated outward interest that created an atmosphere of assessment, differing entirely from the performative concentration he had seen before.
He asked them their names.
They gave them, one at a time, with no jostling or giggling. A boy named Théo in the front row. A girl named Emma beside him. Others whose names he wrote in his register and tried to match to faces.
All of their faces were ordinary: well-fed, regular features, the slight forward lean of children who were accustomed to listening.
He set them a piece of writing for the morning exercise: what did they do last summer? He circled the room while they worked.
They were writing when he looked at their pages, but when he came behind them their hands stopped and they waited until he moved on.
He collected the work at the end of the session. Twenty-three sheets, all completed, and in a very similar, careful round hand.
A single exercise cannot establish that, he thought. Handwriting obviously varies even in children who learn from the same teacher — but it was close enough that he set the sheets out on his desk that evening and compared them.
Lettering, spacing, the treatment of accents. Nearly identical.
He put this down to the previous teacher’s method and didn’t add it to the list of things he was already building in his head.
There were five other members of staff: Madame Aubert herself, who taught CP; a young woman named Céline who taught CE2 and was the only person in the building who behaved around Mathieu with ordinary human inconsistency — eating crisps at her desk, losing her glasses, laughing too loudly at things that were not funny; two older male teachers he barely saw; and the canteen supervisor, Gilles, who didn’t make eye contact.
He asked Céline about the drawings. Or the lack of them.
She was eating a tangerine.
“What about them?”
“There’s nothing on the walls. In my classroom or the corridors. At any school I’ve been in there’s always—”
“Madame Aubert takes them down at the end of the year. Something about the paint.”
“The paint?”
“I don’t know.” She dropped a piece of peel on her desk. “She’s particular about the walls.”
The next morning he found his classroom rearranged.
The desks had been shifted by perhaps thirty centimetres, enough to create a different relationship between his position at the board and the front row. He checked with the caretaker, who said no one had been in the classroom after hours.
He pushed the desks back.
When the children came in, they sat in their usual seats and said nothing.
In the third week he began noticing what the children didn’t do. They didn’t whisper to each other during work sessions. They didn’t pass notes.
They didn’t form the usual sub-clusters — two girls who were better friends than the others, a boy who was excluded, the child who cried without warning.
At playtime they went into the yard and moved in a loose mass, talking at a volume he couldn’t hear from the window, maintaining a constant equidistance from each other.
He stood at the window during the Thursday break and timed it. The gaps between children didn’t change significantly for eight minutes. It was deliberate.
It was more deliberate than anything twenty-three eight-year-olds do by accident.
He mentioned this to Céline and she said, “Kids are strange,” and offered him a crisp.
He rang his friend Bastien in Paris on a Friday night. Bastien was a secondary school teacher who had taught in a village in the Creuse for two years and found it damaging in ways he’d only partially recovered from.
“Small places,” Bastien said. “The children are different. They’re not worse, they’re just — they’ve grown up with fewer people and they’re more formed by those people. It can look odd from outside.”
“This is more than that.”
“How?”
He tried to describe the equidistance. The synchronised handwriting. The fact that no child in his class had made a mistake in an exercise since he’d arrived.
“They might just be well-taught,” Bastien said.
“No one is well-taught enough to never make mistakes.”
“Go and have a drink in the village. Talk to some adults.”
The tabac had two tables and a television mounted above the bar showing a channel he didn’t recognise — a local channel, he assumed, given the lack of production value, but the content was difficult to parse. Long shots of fields. A figure walking in the distance. No narration.
The man behind the bar was perhaps sixty and served him without conversation.
There were two other customers.
An older couple who drank from small glasses and talked to each other at a register he couldn’t catch, and who didn’t look at him.
He drank his beer. On the television the figure in the field had reached a building — a barn or a low stone structure — and stood outside it.
He asked the barman if it was local television.
“Community channel,” the barman said. “Village updates.”
“What’s this programme?”
The barman looked at the screen.
“That’s from last month.” He took Mathieu’s empty glass.
“Local interest.”
The figure on screen was still standing outside the building. The camera didn’t cut. The shot held and held.
Mathieu left four euros on the bar and went home.
In the fourth week, a child named Lucie, who sat at the back and had been until then identical in her attentiveness to the other twenty-two, came to his desk after class.
She stood in front of him while the others filed out with their usual orderly silence.
“Monsieur,” she said.
“Yes, Lucie?”
“I wanted to ask about the exercise.”
She was holding her sheet of paper. Her correction, done in the red pen he’d returned work in. She’d been marked down on one sentence — a run-on, nothing serious.
“Of course,” he said. “You ran two clauses together without a conjunction. If you use a full stop—”
“I know.”
She put the paper down on his desk.
“I did it on purpose.”
He looked at her. Eight years old, mid-length hair, the same direct attention as all of them.
“Why?”
She looked at him for a moment before answering.
“I wanted to see if you’d notice.”
“I’m supposed to notice. That’s my job.”
“The others noticed too.” She picked her paper up again. “They were curious about you.”
He didn’t understand the weight of that particular phrasing — were curious about you — until she’d left the room and he was alone in the cream-walled classroom with the twenty-three empty chairs in their equidistant rows.
In the fifth week he began to find things.
Objects in the classroom that hadn’t been there the day before. A smooth stone on the corner of his desk. A folded piece of paper tucked under the leg of his chair with nothing written on it. A child’s drawing left on the board ledge, unsigned, showing a figure that might have been a person standing in a field, and in the distance a low building.
He asked Céline if she’d experienced anything like this.
“Like what?”
“Things appearing in the room. Left without explanation.”
She looked at him.
“No.”
Then:
“Are you all right?”
He said he was fine.
He rang his mother that weekend and spent an hour talking about things unrelated to Sainte-Clotilde, and afterwards he felt briefly better, and then the feeling went. He looked at the school calendar. November, December, two weeks at Christmas, then January and the long stretch to April. He was contracted for the full year.
The sixth week, one thing changed.
He arrived on a morning in late October to find Madame Aubert in the corridor outside his classroom. She was standing with her back to the wall, and she had the look of a person who has been waiting for longer than they’d planned.
“I wanted to speak with you,” she said.
“Of course.”
“About how you’re finding the class.”
He said they were attentive.
“Yes.” She clasped her hands. “They are. They take time to — adjust to a new teacher. But once they’ve decided, they’re very committed.”
“Decided what?”
She looked at him. She had very clear grey eyes.
“Whether to include someone.”
He said:
“They’re children.”
“Yes,” she said. “They are.”
She moved to go, and then stopped.
“I’m glad you’re staying. Your predecessor left in the second week.”
“What was his name?”
“Ferrault. David Ferrault.”
“Can I contact him?”
She looked at him with those grey eyes.
“I don’t know where he’s gone.”
He asked the question he’d been building for six weeks.
“What happened to the children’s drawings?”
Madame Aubert was already walking away. She turned back once.
“We take them down at the end of every year,” she said. “It upsets the children, having their drawings on the walls. They find it—”
She paused.
“They find it too much.”
He stood in the corridor after she’d gone.
Too much.
He turned the phrase over.
Children generally loved their drawings. The Roubaix school had needed to impose a limit on how long a child’s drawing could stay on the wall before it was rotated out to make room.
These children found it too much.
He went into his classroom.
The children were already there, sitting in their equidistant rows.
Théo, in the front row, looked at him. Beside him Emma looked at him. Twenty-three pairs of eyes, all turned towards the board where his name was still written from September, slightly rubbed but legible.
He sat at his desk.
On the corner of it: a new stone.
Grey, smooth, slightly larger than the one from last week.
He picked it up.
It was warm.
He put it in his pocket and opened the register.
“Bonjour,” he said.
“Bonjour, Monsieur,” said twenty-three voices.
They said it in unison — the syllables landing like a single voice from a single throat.
He wrote the date on the board.
His hand was steady.
When he turned around, there were twenty-three drawings on his desk.
They were all of him.
Not one of them showed him dying.
They all showed him after.
Sunken into the earth.
His limbs twisted into the soil, his head turned towards the school as if he were growing out of the dirt to watch it.
Propped against a tree, neck bent at an impossible angle.
Collapsed at the edge of a field.
The children looked at him with patient expectation.
Mathieu understood then why there were no drawings on the walls.
They didn’t keep things that were finished.
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Creepy in an interesting way. I love it. Thank you for sharing.