The little girl who danced

Yesterday morning, looking distractedly out of the window, I saw, in the midst of the comings and goings of passers-by, scooters and strollers, a little girl who was walking while dancing (or dancing while walking), a big smile to the lips, her mother a few steps behind her. I followed her with my gaze and saw where she was going, dancing, smiling: she was going to school. I said to myself that I would have liked to follow her, to go behind her into her school, into her class, to see what was going on there, which made her so happy to go there, to go there in dancing. I told myself that there was no better sign of a school fulfilling its mission than a school where you go dancing, so happy, impatient, to find it every morning. I said to myself that such should be the ambition of the Minister of National Education, forgetting for a moment all his circulars, all his decrees, all his laws: a school where little girls, where all children are so happy to go every morning let them go there dancing. But also, why not, the teachers, happy, every morning, to find pupils who come to school dancing, and just to see them dancing they, in turn, want to go to school dancing. I then thought of these verses by Rimbaud: “I stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; window-to-window wreaths; chains of star and star gold, and I dance. »

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