Deventer and I looked across at the greater New Aramon where his father lived. It was the Aramon of shops and hotels and factories, while Aramon le Vieux, over which our great lycée throned it like a glorified barracks, was a place of crumbling walls, ancient arcaded streets, twelfth-century palaces let as tenements, and all the interesting débris of a historical city on the verges of Languedoc.
Our French lycéens were too used to all this beauty and antiquity to care anything about it, but we English did. We were left pretty much to ourselves on our rare days of liberty, and as the professors, and especially the proviseur, knew that we were to be trusted, we were allowed to poke about the old Languedocian outpost much as we pleased.
It was the month of January, 1871. France was invaded, beaten, but not conquered; but here in the far South, though tongues wagged fiercely, in his heart the good bourgeois was glad to be out of it all.
At any rate, the lycée was carried on just as usual. Punishments were dealt out and tasks exacted. Pions watched constantly over our unstable morals, and occasionally reported misdemeanours of a milder kind, not daring to make their position worse by revealing anything that really mattered.
But, generally speaking, Aramon le Vieux dreamed away the hours, blinking in the sunshine. The war did not touch it save in the fierce clatter of café dispute. Only in the forts that rose about the arsenal of the newer city opposite to us a feeble guard of artillery and linesmen lingered as a protection for the Small Arms Factory.
For the new Paris Government was still far from stable, and some feared a renewal of the White Terror of 1815, and others the Red of the Commune of 1848. The workmen of the arsenal, hastily gathered from all quarters, were mostly sealed to the "Internationale," but it was supposed that the field-pieces in Fort St. André could easily account for any number of these hot-heads.
Besides Hugh Deventer and I there were several other English boys, but they were still screeching like seagulls somewhere in the Lower School and so did not count, except when an anxious mamma besought us with tears in her voice to look after her darling, abandoned all day to his fate among these horrid French.
To "look after" them Deventer and I could not do, but we gathered them into a sort of fives team, and organised a poor feckless game in the windowless angle of the refectory. We also got hockey sticks and bastinadoed their legs for their souls' good to the great marvel of the natives. Deventer had even been responsible for a trial of lacrosse, but good missionaries though we were, we made no French converts.
The Juniors squealed like driven piglings when the ball came their way, while the Seniors preferred walking up and down their paved cattle-pen, interminably talking with linked arms and lips close to the ear of a chosen friend.
Always one or two read as they walked alone, memorising fiercely against next Saturday's examination.