"Vous dormez, mon ami?... _Sommeil_, eh?" I cried.
The remark was enjoyed. There is so much charity in the hearts of boys!
Another boy had to translate a piece of Carlyle's "French Revolution":
"'Their heads shall fall within a fortnight,' croaks the people's
friend (Marat), clutching his tablets to write----Charlotte Corday has
drawn her knife from the sheath; plunges it, with one sure stroke, into
the writer's heart."
The end of this powerful sentence ran thus in the translation:
"Charlotte Corday a tire son poignard de la gaine, et d'une main sure,
elle le plonge dans le coeur de _celui qui ecrivait_."
When I remonstrated with the dear fellow, he pulled his dictionary out
of his desk, and triumphantly pointed out to me:
"WRITER (substantive), _celui qui ecrit_."
And all the time his look seemed to say:
"What do you think of that? You may be a very clever man; but surely
you do not mean to say that you know better than a dictionary!"
Oh, the French dictionary, that treacherous friend of boys!
The lazy ones take the first word of the list, sometimes the figurative
pronunciation given in the English-French part.