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