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’.”