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 entertain the hope of "making an
opening" in the world of secondary schoolmasters. He accordingly began to
study physics, quite alone, "with an impossible laboratory, experimenting
after his own fashion"; and it was by teaching them to his pupils that he
learned first of all chemistry, inexpensively performing little elementary
experiments before them, "with pipe-bowls for crucibles and aniseed flasks
for retorts," and finally algebra, of which he knew not a word before he
gave his first lesson. (2/2.)