Fabre, Poet of Science | Page 8

knowledge, the passion for all the sciences, of which he thirsted to know at least the elements. Between whiles he returned to his Latin, translating Horace and re-reading Virgil. One day his director put an "Imitation" into his hands, with double columns in Greek and Latin. The latter, which he knew fairly well, assisted him to decipher the Greek. He hastened to commit to memory the vocables, and idioms and phrases of all kinds (1/11.), and in this curious fashion he learned the language. This was his only method of learning languages. It is the process which he recommended to his brother, who was commencing Latin:
"Take Virgil, a dictionary, and a grammar, and translate from Latin into French for ever and for ever; to make a good version you need only common sense and very little grammatical knowledge or other pedantic accessories.
"Imagine an old inscription half-effaced: correctness of judgment partly supplies the missing words, and the sense appears as if the whole were legible. Latin, for you, is the old inscription; the root of the word alone is legible: the veil of an unknown language hides the value of the termination: you have only the half of the words; but you have common sense too, and you will make use of it." (1/12.)
CHAPTER 2.
THE PRIMARY TEACHER.
Furnished with his superior diploma, he left the normal school at the age of nineteen, and commenced as a primary teacher in the College of Carpentras.
The salary of the school teacher, in the year 1842, did not exceed 28 pounds sterling a year, and this ungrateful calling barely fed him, save on "chickpeas and a little wine." But we must beware lest, in view of the increasing and excessive dearness of living in France, the beggarly salaries of the poor schoolmasters of a former day, so little worthy of their labours and their social utility, appear even more disproportionately small than they actually were. What is more to the point, the teachers had no pension to hope for. They could only count on a perpetuity of labour, and when sickness or infirmity arrived, when old age surprised them, after fifty or sixty years of a narrow and precarious existence, it was not merely poverty that awaited them; for many there was nothing but the blackest destitution. A little later, when they began to entertain a vague hope of deliverance, the retiring pension which was held up to their gaze, in the distant future, was at first no more than forty francs, and they had to await the advent of Duruy, the great minister and liberator, before primary instruction was in some degree raised from this ignominious level of abasement.
It was a melancholy place, this college, "where life had something cloistral about it: each master occupied two cells, for, in consideration of a modest payment, the majority were lodged in the establishment, and ate in common at the principal's table."
It was a laborious life, full of distasteful and repugnant duties. We can readily imagine, with the aid of the striking picture which Fabre has drawn for us, what life was in these surroundings, and what the teaching was: "Between four high walls I see the court, a sort of bear-pit where the scholars quarrelled for the space beneath the boughs of a plane-tree; all around opened the class-rooms, oozing with damp and melancholy, like so many wild beasts' cages, deficient in light and air...for seats, a plank fixed to the wall...in the middle a chair, the rushes of the seat departed, a blackboard, and a stick of chalk." (2/1.)
Let the teachers of our spacious and well-lighted schools of to-day ponder on these not so distant years, and measure the progress accomplished. Evoking the memory of their humble colleague of Carpentras, may they feel the true greatness of his example: a noble and a glorious example, of which they may well be proud.
And what pupils! "Dirty, unmannerly: fifty young scoundrels, children or big lads, with whom," no doubt, "he used to squabble," but whom, after all, he contrived to manage, and by whom he was listened to and respected: for he knew precisely what to say to them, and how, while talking lightly, to teach them the most serious things. For the joy of teaching, and of continually learning by teaching others, made everything endurable. Not only did he teach them to read, write, and cipher, which then included almost the entire programme of primary education; he endeavoured also to place his own knowledge at their service, as he himself acquired it.
It was not only his love of the work that sustained him; it was the desire to escape from the rut, to accomplish yet another stage; to emerge, in short, from so unsatisfactory a position. Now nothing but physical and mathematical science would allow him to