Among those professors who seemed, during my school-days, so severe, and
indeed almost cruel to me, the most terrible without any exception were
the “Bull of Apis” and the “Big Black Ape” (I had nicknames for all
of them). I hope should they read this they will understand that I am
writing from the child's view-point. Should I meet them to-day I would,
in all probability, humbly tender them my hand and ask their pardon for
having been such an unmanageable pupil.
Oh! the Big Ape especially, how I hated him! When from the height of his
desk these words fell upon my ear: “You will do a hundred lines; I
mean you, you little sap-head!” I could have flown at his face like an
enraged cat. He was the first to arouse in me those sudden and violent
outbursts of rage that characterized me as a man, outbreaks which
could scarcely have been foreseen in a child of my sweet and patient
disposition.
I would be doing myself a great injustice in saying that I was
altogether a bad scholar, I was, rather, an unequal and erratic one; one
day at the head of my class, the next day at the foot; but on the whole
I maintained a fair average, and at the end of the year I received the
prize for translation--I won no others however. It surprised me that
every one in the class did not receive the prize that I had won without
great effort, for translation was extraordinarily easy for me. On the
other hand I found composition very difficult, and narration still more
so.
Little by little I deserted my own work-desk, and in my aunt Claire's
room, near the china bon-bon bear, I underwent with as much resignation
as possible, the torture that the preparing of my tasks imposed. On the
wainscoting of the wall, in a hidden recess of the room, there is still
visible, among the other fantastical sketches, a pen-portrait of the
“Big Ape”; the ink has faded to a light yellow, but the drawing has
endured, and when I look at it I again feel a sort of deadly weariness,
and a sensation of suffocation chills me through and through--in short I
once more live over those dread school-days.
Aunt Claire was more than ever my resource during those hard times; she
always looked up words for me in the dictionary, and often she took upon
herself the task of writing for me, in an assumed hand, the exercises
exacted by the “Big Ape.”