Part 27

Idiotic reminiscences! as charming to revive as any old song with words of little meaning that meant so much when one was four--five--six years old! Before one knew even how to spell them!

"Paille à Dine--paille à Chine-- Paille à Suzette et Martine-- Bon lit à la Dumaine!"

Céline, my nurse, used to sing this--and I never knew what it meant; nor do I now! But it was charming indeed.

Even now I dream that I go back to school, to get coached by Dumollard in a little more algebra. I wander about the playground; but all the boys are new, and don't even know my name; and silent, sad, and ugly, every one! Again Dumollard persecutes me. And in the middle of it I reflect that, after all, he is a person of no importance whatever, and that I am a member of the British Parliament--a baronet--a millionaire--and one of her Majesty's Privy Councillors! and that M. Dumollard must be singularly "out of it," even for a Frenchman, not to be aware of this.

"If he only knew!" says I to myself, says I--in my dream.

Besides, can't the man see with his own eyes that I'm grown up, and big enough to tuck him under my left arm, and spank him just as if he were a little naughty boy--confound the brute!

Then, suddenly:

"Maurice, au piquet pour une heure!"

"Moi, m'sieur?"

"Oui, vous!"

"Pourquoi, m'sieur!"

"Parce que ça me plaît!"

And I wake--and could almost weep to find how old I am!

And Barty Josselin is no more--oh! my God! ... and his dear wife survived him just twenty-four hours!

* * * * *

Behold us both "en Philosophie!"

And Barty the head boy of the school, though not the oldest--and the brilliant show-boy of the class.

Just before Easter (1851) he and I and Rapaud and Laferté and Jolivet trois (who was nineteen) and Palaiseau and Bussy-Rabutin went up for our "bachot" at the Sorbonne.

We sat in a kind of big musty school-room with about thirty other boys from other schools and colleges. There we sat side by side from ten till twelve at long desks, and had a long piece of Latin dictated to us, with the punctuation in French: "un point--point et virgule--deux points--point d'exclamation--guillemets--ouvrez la parenthèse," etc., etc.--monotonous details that enervate one at such a moment!

Then we set to work with our dictionaries and wrote out a translation according to our lights--a pion walking about and watching us narrowly for cribs, in case we should happen to have one for this particular extract, which was most unlikely.

Barty's nose bled, I remember--and this made him nervous.

Then we went and lunched at the Café de l'Odéon, on the best omelet we had ever tasted.

"Te rappelles-tu cette omelette?" said poor Barty to me only last Christmas as ever was!

Then we went back with our hearts in our mouths to find if we had qualified ourselves by our "version écrite" for the oral examination that comes after, and which is so easy to pass--the examiners having lunched themselves into good-nature.

There we stood panting, some fifty boys and masters, in a small, whitewashed room like a prison. An official comes in and puts the list of candidates in a frame on the wall, and we crane our necks over each other's shoulders.

And, lo! Barty is plucked--collé! and I have passed, and actually Rapaud--and no one else from Brossard's!

An old man--a parent or grandparent probably of some unsuccessful candidate--bursts into tears and exclaims,

"Oh! qué malheur--qué malheur!"