Pupil Godard, who was a chubby-faced fellow with sleepy eyes, rose automatically and in one single stream, like a running tap, recited, without stopping to take breath, “The Wolf and the Lamb,” rolling off La Fontaine’s fable like the thread from a bobbin run by steam.

“The-strongest-reason-is-always-the-best-and-we-wil
l-prove-it-at-once-a-lamb-was-quenching-his-thirst-in-a-stream-of-pure-running-water—­”

Suddenly Godard was confused, he hesitated.  The machine had been badly oiled.  Something obstructed the bobbin.

“In-a-stream-of-pure-running-water-in-a stream—­”

Then he stopped short, the tap was closed.  Godard did not know his lesson, and he, too, was condemned to remain on guard under the sycamore during recess.

After pupil Godard came pupil Grosdidier; then Blanc, then Moreau (Gaston), then Moreau (Ernest), then Malepert; then another, and another, who babbled with the same intelligence and volubility, with the same piping voice, this cruel and wonderful fable.  It was as irritating and monotonous as a fine rain.  All the pupils in the “ninth preparatory” were disgusted for fifteen years, at least, with this most exquisite of French poems.

Little Amedee wanted to cry; he listened with stupefaction blended with fright as the scholars by turns unwound their bobbins.  To think that to-morrow he must do the same!  He never would be able.  M. Tavernier frightened him very much, too.  The yellow-complexioned usher, seated nonchalantly in his armchair, was not without pretension; in spite of his black coat with the “take-me-out-of-pawn” air, polished his nails, and only opened his mouth at times to utter a reprimand or pronounce sentence of punishment.

This was school, then!  Amedee recalled the pleasant reading-lessons that the eldest of the Gerards had given him—­that good Louise, so wise and serious and only ten years old, pointing out his letters to him in a picture alphabet with a knitting-needle, always so patient and kind.  The child was overcome at the very first with a disgust for school, and gazed through the window which lighted the room at the noiselessly moving, large, indented leaves of the melancholy sycamore.

CHAPTER III

PAPA AND MAMMA GERARD

One, two, three years rolled by without anything very remarkable happening to the inhabitants of the fifth story.

The quarter had not changed, and it still had the appearance of a suburban faubourg.  They had just erected, within gunshot of the house where the Violettes and Gerards lived, a large five-story building, upon whose roof still trembled in the wind the masons’ withered bouquets.  But that was all.  In front of them, on the lot “For Sale,” enclosed by rotten boards, where one could always see tufts of nettles and a goat tied to a stake, and upon the high wall above which by the end of April the lilacs hung in their perfumed clusters, the rains had not effaced this brutal declaration of love, scraped with a knife in the plaster:  “When Melie wishes she can have me,” and signed “Eugene.”