Once more, here am I, somewhat late in life, at Carpentras, whose
rude Gallic name sets the fool smiling and the scholar thinking.
Dear little town where I spent my twentieth year and left the first
bits of my fleece upon life's bushes, my visit of today is a
pilgrimage; I have come to lay my eyes once more upon the place
which saw the birth of the liveliest impressions of my early days.
I bow, in passing, to the old college where I tried my prentice
hand as a teacher. Its appearance is unchanged; it still looks
like a penitentiary. Those were the views of our mediaeval
educational system. To the gaiety and activity of boyhood, which
were considered unwholesome, it applied the remedy of narrowness,
melancholy and gloom. Its houses of instruction were, above all,
houses of correction. The freshness of Virgil was interpreted in
the stifling atmosphere of a prison. I catch a glimpse of a yard
between four high walls, a sort of bear pit, where the scholars
fought for room for their games under the spreading branches of a
plane tree. All around were cells that looked like horse boxes,
without light or air; those were the classrooms. I speak in the
past tense, for doubtless the present day has seen the last of this
academic destitution.

Here is the tobacco shop where, on Wednesday evening, coming out of
the college, I would buy on credit the wherewithal to fill my pipe
and thus to celebrate on the eve the joys of the morrow, that
blessed Thursday [the weekly half-holiday in French schools] which
I considered so well employed in solving hard equations,
experimenting with new chemical reagents, collecting and
identifying my plants. I would make my timid request, pretending
to have come out without my money, for it is hard for a self-
respecting man to admit that he is penniless. My candor appears to