He gave me some boûts-rimés to finish, and I strove hard to compose French poetry. But the abbé was right; and at the end of a week I had had enough of it.
All my other lessons continued as usual. The Abbé Grégoire came at eleven o'clock every day to give me two hours' lessons, while the rest of the day I had pretty much to myself; and this is what happened.
My professor, to save himself trouble, had a Virgil and a Tacitus, with the translation side by side with the original. These two volumes he left behind him at our house each day, to save carrying them backwards and forwards, and he locked them up in a little cabinet, carefully taking the key away, knowing what a great temptation they would be to an idle boy like me.
Unluckily, I made the discovery that the box had hinges on the outside. With the help of a screw-driver I half opened the hinges, and extracted whatever I wanted through this half-open space, sometimes the singer of Æneas, at others the historian of the Cæsars; and, thanks to the help of the French translation, I produced versions which astonished even the professor.
As for my mother, she was charmed.
"Look at that child," she would say to all callers; "he shuts himself up, and in an hour the whole of his home lessons for the day are done."
I did indeed shut myself up, and with the utmost precautions. But, unfortunately, things did not prosper so well on composition days as on those of translation.
The exercises were dictated by the abbé, but, alas! there was no translation to their Latin locked away in any sort of cabinet; they had to be done by the help of a dictionary, and the result was that they were full of mistakes, which counterbalanced, in the mind of my teacher, the good effect of my translations, and eternally puzzled the poor man with the question as to how "The child could be so good in translation and so weak in composition." He died without finding the solution to it.
So it came about that on composition days the work took me four hours instead of two: but, even then, the two or four hours' work left me ten or twelve hours free each day. It will be seen that I had plenty of time at my own disposal.