This subject of Latin that has been dinned into our ears for some time
past recalls to my mind a story--a story of my youth.
I was finishing my studies with a teacher, in a big central town, at
the Institution Robineau, celebrated through the entire province for the
special attention paid there to the study of Latin.
For the past ten years, the Robineau Institute beat the imperial lycee
of the town at every competitive examination, and all the colleges of
the subprefecture, and these constant successes were due, they said, to
an usher, a simple usher, M. Piquedent, or rather Pere Piquedent.
He was one of those middle-aged men quite gray, whose real age it is
impossible to tell, and whose history we can guess at first glance.
Having entered as an usher at twenty into the first institution that
presented itself so that he could proceed to take first his degree of
Master of Arts and afterward the degree of Doctor of Laws, he found
himself so enmeshed in this routine that he remained an usher all his
life. But his love for Latin did not leave him and harassed him like an
unhealthy passion. He continued to read the poets, the prose writers,
the historians, to interpret them and penetrate their meaning, to
comment on them with a perseverance bordering on madness.
One day, the idea came into his head to oblige all the students in his
class to answer him in Latin only; and he persisted in this resolution
until at last they were capable of sustaining an entire conversation
with him just as they would in their mother tongue. He listened to them,
as a leader of an orchestra listens to his musicians rehearsing, and
striking his desk every moment with his ruler, he exclaimed:
“Monsieur Lefrere, Monsieur Lefrere, you are committing a solecism! You
forget the rule.
“Monsieur Plantel, your way of expressing yourself is altogether French
and in no way Latin. You must understand the genius of a language. Look
here, listen to me.”
Now, it came to pass that the pupils of the Institution Robineau
carried off, at the end of the year, all the prizes for composition,
translation, and Latin conversation.
Next year, the principal, a little man, as cunning as an ape, whom he
resembled in his grinning and grotesque appearance, had had printed on
his programmes, on his advertisements, and painted on the door of his
institution:
“Latin Studies a Specialty. Five first prizes carried off in the five
classes of the lycee.
“Two honor prizes at the general examinations in competition with all
the lycees and colleges of France.”
For ten years the Institution Robineau triumphed in the same fashion.
Now my father, allured by these successes, sent me as a day pupil to
Robineau's--or, as we called it, Robinetto or Robinettino's--and made
me take special private lessons from Pere Piquedent at the rate of five
francs per hour, out of which the usher got two francs and the principal
three francs. I was then eighteen, and was in the philosophy class.
These private lessons were given in a little room looking out on the
street. It so happened that Pere Piquedent, instead of talking Latin to
me, as he did when teaching publicly in the institution, kept telling me
his troubles in French. Without relations, without friends, the poor man
conceived an attachment to me, and poured out his misery to me.
He had never for the last ten or fifteen years chatted confidentially
with any one.
“I am like an oak in a desert,” he said--“'sicut quercus in
solitudine'.”
The other ushers disgusted him. He knew nobody in the town, since he had
no time to devote to making acquaintances.
“Not even the nights, my friend, and that is the hardest thing on me.
The dream of my life is to have a room with my own furniture, my own
books, little things that belong to myself and which others may not
touch. And I have nothing of my own, nothing except my trousers and my
frock-coat, nothing, not even my mattress and my pillow! I have not four
walls to shut myself up in, except when I come to give a lesson in this
room. Do you see what this means--a man forced to spend his life without
ever having the right, without ever finding the time, to shut himself up
all alone, no matter where, to think, to reflect, to work, to dream?
Ah! my dear boy, a key, the key of a door which one can lock--this is
happiness, mark you, the only happiness!
“Here, all day long, teaching all those restless rogues, and during the
night the dormitory with the same restless rogues snoring. And I have
to sleep in the bed at the end of two rows of beds occupied by these
youngsters whom I must look after. I can never be alone, never! If I go
out I find the streets full of people, and, when I am tired of walking,
I go into some cafe crowded with smokers and billiard players. I tell
you what, it is the life of a galley slave.”