While I was thinking of all this, I heard my name called.  It was my turn to recite.  What would I not have given to be able to say that dreadful rule for the participle all through, very loud and clear, and without one mistake?  But I got mixed up on the first words and stood there, holding on to my desk, my heart beating, and not daring to look up.  I heard M. Hamel say to me: 

“I won’t scold you, little Franz; you must feel bad enough.  See how it is!  Every day we have said to ourselves:  ’Bah!  I’ve plenty of time.  I’ll learn it to-morrow.’  And now you see where we’ve come out.  Ah, that’s the great trouble with Alsace; she puts off learning till to-morrow.  Now those fellows out there will have the right to say to you:  ’How is it; you pretend to be Frenchmen, and yet you can neither speak nor write your own language?’ But you are not the worst, poor little Franz.  We’ve all a great deal to reproach ourselves with.

“Your parents were not anxious enough to have you learn.  They preferred to put you to work on a farm or at the mills, so as to have a little more money.  And I?  I’ve been to blame also.  Have I not often sent you to water my flowers instead of learning your lessons?  And when I wanted to go fishing, did I not just give you a holiday?”

Then, from one thing to another, M. Hamel went on to talk of the French language, saying that it was the most beautiful language in the world—­the clearest, the most logical; that we must guard it among us and never forget it, because when a people are enslaved, as long as they hold fast to their language it is as if they had the key to their prison.  Then he opened a grammar and read us our lesson.  I was amazed to see how well I understood it.  All he said seemed so easy, so easy!  I think, too, that I had never listened so carefully, and that he had never explained everything with so much patience.  It seemed almost as if the poor man wanted to give us all he knew before going away, and to put it all into our heads at one stroke.

After the grammar, we had a lesson in writing.  That day M. Hamel had new copies for us, written in a beautiful round hand:  France, Alsace, France, Alsace.  They looked like little flags floating everywhere in the school-room, hung from the rod at the top of our desks.  You ought to have seen how every one set to work, and how quiet it was!  The only sound was the scratching of the pens over the paper.  Once some beetles flew in; but nobody paid any attention to them, not even the littlest ones, who worked right on tracing their fish-hooks, as if that was French, too.  On the roof the pigeons cooed very low, and I thought to myself: 

“Will they make them sing in German, even the pigeons?”