Ouf! I could endure no more.
“Now,” the Professor went on, “a child of two could do the demonstration. Have you nothing to observe with reference to the two triangles, BAC and NAE?”
As silence only prolonged my torture, I replied laconically, “Nothing.”
“In other words, you know nothing at all?”
“I think you ought to have seen that some time ago,” I replied, with a calm worthy of Socrates.
“Very good, very good! Is that the tone you take? And don’t you even know that the theorem of Pythagoras is also called the Asses’ Bridge, because it is just the asses who cannot get past it? You can go. I hope you understand that you have not passed in this examination. That will teach you to read Don Quixote and draw cats during my lessons!”
The Government Inspector took a pinch of snuff; I laid down the chalk and the duster, and walked majestically out of the hall, amid the stifled laughter of my school-fellows.
Three or four comrades who had already passed through the ordeal with no very brilliant result were waiting for me outside.
“Ploughed, then?”
“Ploughed!” I replied, throwing myself into an attitude of heroic defiance; adding presently, “I always said that mathematics were only made for dunces.”