This subject of Latin that has been dinned into our ears for some time past recalls to my
mind a story--a story of my youth.
I was finishing my studies with a teacher, in a big central town, at the Institution
Robineau, celebrated through the entire province for the special attention paid there to the
study of Latin.
For the past ten years, the Robineau Institute beat the imperial lycee of the town at every
competitive examination, and all the colleges of the subprefecture, and these constant
successes were due, they said, to an usher, a simple usher, M. Piquedent, or rather Pere
Piquedent.
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.
