exercise itself freely in every direction, and little by little it became
universal. A chance chemistry lesson finally awakened in him the appetite
for 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.