"Parce que ça me plaît!"
And I wake—and could almost weep to find how old I am!
And Barty Josselin is no more—oh! my God!... and his dear wife survived him just twenty‑four hours!
Behold us both "en Philosophie!"
And Barty the head boy of the school, though not the oldest—and the brilliant show‑boy of the class.
Just before Easter (1851) he and I and Rapaud and Laferté and Jolivet trois (who was nineteen) and Palaiseau and Bussy‑Rabutin went up for our "bachot" at the Sorbonne.
We sat in a kind of big musty school‑room with about thirty other boys from other schools and colleges. There we sat side by side from ten till twelve at long desks, and had a long piece of Latin dictated to us, with the punctuation in French: "un point—point et virgule—deux points—point d'exclamation—guillemets—ouvrez la parenthèse," etc., etc.—monotonous details that enervate one at such a moment!
Then we set to work with our dictionaries and wrote out a translation according to our lights—a pion walking about and watching us narrowly for cribs, in case we should happen to have one for this particular extract, which was most unlikely.
Barty's nose bled, I remember—and this made him nervous.