to beat their wives with sticks no thicker than their ankles, and sell them "au rabais" in the horse‑market of Smissfeld; and that they paid men to box each other to death on the stage of Drury Lane, and all that—deplorable things that we all know and are sorry for and ashamed, but cannot put a stop to.
The boys laughed, of course; they always did when Dumollard tried to be funny, "and many a joke had he," although his wit never degenerated into mere humor.
But they were so fond of Barty that they forgave him his insular affectation; some even helped him to dab his sore eye; among them Jolivet trois himself, who was a very good‑natured chap, and very good‑looking into the bargain; and he had received from Barty a sore eye too—gallicè, "un pochon"—scholasticè, "un œil au beurre noir!"
By‑the‑way, I fought with Jolivet once—about Æsop's fables! He said that Æsop was a lame poet of Lacedæmon—I, that Æsop was a little hunchback Armenian Jew; and I stuck to it. It was a Sunday afternoon, on the terrace by the lingerie.
He kicked as hard as he could, so I had to kick too. Mlle. Marceline ran out with Constance and Félicité and tried to separate us, and got kicked by both (unintentionally, of course). Then up came Père Jaurion and kicked me! And they all took Jolivet's part, and said I was in the wrong, because I was English! What did they know about Æsop! So we made it up, and went in Jaurion's loge and stood each other a blomboudingue on tick—and called Jaurion bad names.
"Comme c'est bête, de s'battre, hein?" said Jolivet, and I agreed with him. I don't know which of us really got the worst of it, for we hadn't disfigured each other in the least—and that's the best of kicking. Anyhow he was two years older than I, and three or four inches taller; so I'm glad, on the whole, that that small battle was interrupted.
It is really not for brag that I have lugged in this story—at least, I hope not. One never quite knows.
To go back to Barty: he was the most generous boy in the school. If I may paraphrase an old saying, he really didn't seem to know the difference betwixt tuum et meum. Everything he had, books, clothes, pocket‑money—even agate marbles, those priceless possessions to a French school‑boy—seemed to be also everybody else's who chose. I came across a very characteristic letter of his the other day, written from the Pension Brossard to his favorite aunt, Lady Caroline Grey (one of the Rohans), who adored him. It begins:
"My Dear Aunt Caroline—Thank you so much for the magnifying‑glass, which is not only magnifying, but magnifique. Don't trouble to send any more gingerbread‑nuts, as the boys are getting rather tired of them, especially Laferté and Bussy‑Rabutin. I think we should all like some Scotch marmalade," etc., etc.
And though fond of romancing a little now and then, and embellishing a good story, he was absolutely truthful in important matters, and to be relied upon implicitly.
He seemed also to be quite without the sense of physical fear—a kind of callousness.
Such, roughly, was the boy who lived to write the Motes in a Moonbeam and La quatriéme Dimension before he was thirty; and such, roughly, he remained through life, except for one thing: he grew to be the very soul of passionate and compassionate sympathy, as who doesn't feel who has ever read a page of his work, or even had speech with him for half an hour?
Whatever weaknesses he yielded to when he grew to man's estate are such as the world only too readily condones in many a famous man less tempted than Josselin was inevitably bound to be through life. Men of the Josselin type (there are not many—he stands pretty much alone) can scarcely be expected to journey from adolescence to middle age with that impeccable decorum which I—and no doubt many of my masculine readers—have found it so easy to achieve, and find it now so pleasant to remember and get credit for. Let us think of The Footprints of Aurora, or Étoiles mortes, or Déjanire et Dalila, or even Les Trépassées de François Villon!
Then let us look at Rajon's etching of Watts's portrait of him (the original is my own to look at whenever I like, and that is pretty often). And then let us not throw too many big stones, or too hard, at Barty Josselin.
Well, the summer term of 1847 wore smoothly to its close—a happy "trimestre" during which the Institution F. Brossard reached the high‑water mark of its prosperity.
There were sixty boys to be taught, and six house‑masters to teach them, besides a few highly paid outsiders for special classes—such as the lively M. Durosier for French literature, and M. le Professeur Martineau for the higher mathematics, and so forth; and crammers and coachers for St.‑Cyr, the Polytechnic School, the École des Ponts et Chaussées.
Also fencing‑masters, gymnastic masters, a Dutch master who taught us German and Italian—an Irish master with a lovely brogue who taught us English. Shall I ever forget the blessed day when ten or twelve of us were presented with an Ivanhoe apiece as a class‑book, or how Barty and I and Bonneville (who knew English) devoured the immortal story in less than a week—to the disgust of Rapaud, who refused to believe that we could possibly know such a beastly tongue as English well enough to read an English book for mere pleasure—on our desks in play‑time, or on our laps in school, en cachette! "Quelle sacrée pose!"
He soon mislaid his own copy, did Rapaud; just as he mislaid my Monte Cristo and Jolivet's illustrated Wandering Jew—and it was always:
"Dis donc, Maurice!—prête‑moi ton Ivanhoé!" (with an accent on the e), whenever he had to construe his twenty lines of Valtére Scott—and what a hash he made of them!
Sometimes M. Brossard himself would come, smoking his big meerschaum, and help the English class during preparation, and put us up to a thing or two worth knowing.
"Rapaud, comment dit‑on 'pouvoir' en anglais?"
"Sais pas, m'sieur!"
"Comment, petit crétin, tu ne sais pas!"
And Rapaud would receive a pincée tordue—a "twisted pinch"—on the back of his arm to quicken his memory.
"Oh, là, là!" he would howl—"je n' sais pas!"
"Et toi, Maurice?"
"Ça se dit 'to be able,' m'sieur!" I would say.
"Mais non, mon ami—tu oublies ta langue natale—ça se dit, 'to can'! Maintenant, comment dirais‑tu en anglais, 'je voudrais pouvoir'?"
"Je dirais, 'I would like to be able.'"
"Comment, encore! petit cancre! allons—tu es Anglais—tu sais bien que tu dirais, 'I vould vill to can'!"
Then M. Brossard turns to Barty: "A ton tour, Josselin!"
"Moi, m'sieur?" says Barty.
"Oui, toi!—comment dirais‑tu, 'je pourrais vouloir'?"
"Je dirais 'I vould can to vill,'" says Barty, quite unabashed.
"À la bonne heure! au moins tu sais ta langue, toi!" says Père Brossard, and pats him on the cheek; while Barty winks at me, the wink of successful time‑serving hypocrisy, and Bonneville writhes with suppressed delight.
What lives most in my remembrance of that summer is the lovely weather we had, and the joy of the Passy swimming‑bath every Thursday and Sunday from two till five or six; it comes back to me even now in heavenly dreams by night. I swim with giant side‑strokes all round the Île des Cygnes between Passy and Grenelle, where the École de Natation was moored for the summer months.
Round and round the isle I go, up stream and down, and dive and float and wallow with bliss there is no telling—till the waters all dry up and disappear, and I am left wading in weeds and mud and drift and drought and desolation, and wake up shivering—and such is life.
As for Barty, he was all but amphibious, and reminded me of the seal at the Jardin des Plantes. He really seemed to spend most of the afternoon under water, coming up to breathe now