"My Dear Aunt Caroline,—Thank you so much for the magnifying‑glass, which is not only magnifying, but magnifique. Don't trouble to send any more gingerbread‑nuts, as the boys are getting rather tired of them, especially Laferté and Bussy‑Rabutin. I think we should all like some Scotch marmalade," etc., etc.
And though fond of romancing a little now and then, and embellishing a good story, he was absolutely truthful in important matters, and to be relied upon implicitly.
He seemed also to be quite without the sense of physical fear—a kind of callousness.
Such, roughly, was the boy who lived to write the Motes in a Moonbeam and La quatriéme Dimension before he was thirty; and such, roughly, he remained through life, except for one thing: he grew to be the very soul of passionate and compassionate sympathy, as who doesn't feel who has ever read a page of his work, or even had speech with him for half an hour?
Whatever weaknesses he yielded to when he grew to man's estate are such as the world only too readily condones in many a famous man less tempted than Josselin was inevitably bound to be through life. Men of the Josselin type (there are not many—he stands pretty much alone) can scarcely be expected to journey from adolescence to middle age with that impeccable decorum which I—and no doubt many of my masculine readers—have found it so easy to achieve, and find it now so pleasant to remember and get credit for. Let us think of The Footprints of Aurora, or Étoiles mortes, or Déjanire et Dalila, or even Les Trépassées de François Villon!
Then let us look at Rajon's etching of Watts's portrait of him (the original is my own to look at whenever I like, and that is pretty often). And then let us not throw too many big stones, or too hard, at Barty Josselin.
Well, the summer term of 1847 wore smoothly to its close—a happy "trimestre" during which the Institution F. Brossard reached the high‑water mark of its prosperity.
There were sixty boys to be taught, and six house‑masters to teach them, besides a few highly paid outsiders for special classes—such as the lively M. Durosier for French literature, and M. le Professeur Martineau for the higher mathematics, and so forth; and crammers and coachers for St.‑Cyr, the Polytechnic School, the École des Ponts et Chaussées.
Also fencing‑masters, gymnastic masters, a Dutch master who taught us German and Italian—an Irish master with a lovely brogue who taught us English. Shall I ever forget the blessed day when ten or twelve of us were presented with an Ivanhoe apiece as a class‑book, or how Barty and I and Bonneville (who knew English) devoured the immortal story in less than a week—to the disgust of Rapaud, who refused to believe that we could possibly know such a beastly tongue as English well enough to read an English book for mere pleasure—on our desks in play‑time, or on our laps in school, en cachette! "Quelle sacrée pose!"
He soon mislaid his own copy, did Rapaud; just as he mislaid my Monte Cristo and Jolivet's illustrated Wandering Jew—and it was always: