It was her pleasure to teach, but, alas! not mine to learn; and we cost each other many a sigh, but loved each other all the more, perhaps.
Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's, opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin and French-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, a Cambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize) the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us what sorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.
Perhaps the Greek and Latin quantities are a luxury of English growth—a mere social test—a little pitfall of our own invention, like the letter h, for the tripping up of unwary pretenders; or else, French education being so deplorably cheap in those days, the school-masters there could not afford to take such fanciful superfluities into consideration; it was not to be done at the price.
In France, be it remembered, the King and his greengrocer sent their sons to the same school (which did not happen to be M. Saindou's, by the way, where it was nearly all greengrocer and no King); and the fee for bed, board, and tuition, in all public schools alike, was something like thirty pounds a year.
The Latin, in consequence, was without the distinction that comes of exclusiveness, and quite lacked that aristocratic flavor, so grateful and comforting to scholar and ignoramus alike, which the costly British public-school system (and the British accent) alone can impart to a dead language. When French is dead we shall lend it a grace it never had before; some of us even manage to do so already.
That is (no doubt) why the best French writers so seldom point their morals and adorn their tales, as ours do, with the usual pretty, familiar, and appropriate lines out of Horace or Virgil; and why Latin is so little quoted in French talk, except here and there by a weary shop-walker, who sighs—
"Varium et mutabile semper femina!" as he rolls up the unsold silk; or exclaims, "O rus! quando te aspiciam!" as he takes his railway ticket for Asnières on the first fine Sunday morning in spring.
But this is a digression, and we have wandered far away from Mr. Slade.
Good old Slade!
We used to sit on the tone posts outside the avenue gate and watch for his appearance at a certain distant corner of the winding street.