Queen Hedwige Girls' School

Queen Hedwig’s Girls’ School is the institution Doctor Anger arranges for Stefania to attend with Adèle, and its bright classrooms become the setting for a painful collision between care, discipline, and public judgment. The school offers Stefania an education she might otherwise have been denied, but it does not make her feel at home: she would rather serve Doctor Anger in his study, and her private world of play and attachment is repeatedly brought under the school’s rules and scrutiny.

Admission and the life Stefania would have chosen

Doctor Anger secures places at the new girls’ school for both Stefania and Adèle. Stefania understands that this is a significant kindness. As a poor Ruthenian orphan, she could easily have been left without the chance to learn to read or write her name; Doctor Anger has already saved her life, given her shelter, and provided food and clothing, and her admission adds education to that history of care.

Yet gratitude does not make school her preference. Stefania would rather stay at home beside Doctor Anger while he works in his study. She imagines bringing him coffee with cream and carefully pouring ink into the narrow neck of his crystal inkwell. The contrast is telling: the formal education made possible by his generosity competes with the domestic service through which Stefania has learned to attach herself to his household. At school, she is expected to join the world of young ladies; at home, she would rather remain useful and close to the person who has provided for her.

Classroom discipline and divided attention

The school’s pupils appear to Stefania as delicately dressed dolls, with fine braids arranged around their small heads. A children’s song about dolls going to a ball and one pale-pink doll becoming queen echoes through her thoughts. Instead of concentrating on prayers, she hears the songs she and Adèle used during their games. The playful refrain competes with the religious lesson, making visible how strongly Stefania’s attention remains bound to her bond with Adèle and to the imaginative life they share.

Sister Apollinaria stands for the school’s coercive side. She watches Stefania sternly and can hurt her by shoving her. When she catches Stefania by the shoulders and shakes her, the classroom seems to spin: rows of fair-haired pupils, an icon of the Virgin and Child, and a picture of a moustached old uhlan with a sabre blur together. The scene is rendered through Stefania’s disoriented perception rather than as a detached account of school routine. Her distress turns the room’s religious and military images into parts of a world suddenly out of control.

The watch, the accusation, and the journey home

In the upheaval, Stefania experiences her heart as escaping her chest and rising toward the sky. The Catholic pupils react with wonder, while Stefania feels herself becoming angelic and emptied of her heart. The Tissot watch falls with a crash; the small birdcage attached to it rings against the floor, and its chain coils around it. One pupil immediately accuses Stefania of having stolen the watch from her father. The school’s apparent miracle is thus entangled with an accusation: the girls interpret what they see as a spectacle, while Stefania undergoes it as a frightening loss of bodily and emotional control.

Sister Apollinaria takes Stefania and Adèle home, pulling Stefania along even though she walks at Adèle’s pace. Adèle looks straight ahead and does not meet Stefania’s eyes. Stefania continues to admire her pride even as she feels exhausted and wishes to disappear into darkness. On Sapieżyńska Street, she sees shops and prosperous apartments, then breaks into tears after meeting the gaze of a small gray poodle with a ribbon at its neck. Sister Apollinaria lifts her roughly by the arm and carries her for several metres, knocking her painfully against trees or an iron fence. In a large semicircular window, Stefania sees herself as resigned and foolish, like a rag doll with button eyes; the doll-song returns as a refrain against her humiliation.

Doctor Anger’s intervention and the school’s significance

When the girls reach home, Doctor Anger opens the door in his nightcap, dressing gown, and silk pyjama trousers. Stefania and Adèle begin to cry at the same time. He kneels and takes each girl by the hand, responding to them as if they were both his daughters and as if they were sisters by blood. Adèle then accuses Stefania of stealing the watch, turning the school’s charge into a conflict inside the household that had enabled Stefania’s education.

Sister Apollinaria hands over the Tissot. Doctor Anger examines it and finds that its glass is damaged by a barely perceptible diagonal crack, although the mechanism still keeps time precisely. Its return and continued ticking counter the emotional chaos of the journey home with the instrument’s ordinary, measured operation. The school’s importance therefore lies not simply in Stefania’s admission: it is where education and discipline meet vulnerability, where a private bond becomes visible to other people, and where a fall and accusation threaten to define Stefania before Doctor Anger’s care can answer them.