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trying to fix their faces in my memory, for I don’t know how to recognize them yet, except the ones who were with me last year, you in particular, Pierre,

who raise your brown eyes when I come up to your name,

after “. . . Daval, de Joigny, de Loups”,

before going on to “Estier, Fage Jean-Claude, Fage Henri . . .”,

giving me a smile I don’t want to answer, because it’s obviously better if as many of your classmates as possible were unaware for as long as possible that we’re related, so that in their eyes you’re the same to me as many of them.

Your uncle Henri Jouret, on the other side of the wall behind me, is coping with his senior French students, calling the role, trying to get their seats and faces straight before going to the questions and the analysis of a page of Saint-Simon.


I have already been in this classroom with you. It was our second geography lesson.

“Zola, what can you tell me about the atmosphere?”

“Wolf, what do you know about the internal structure of this planet?”

“And now, Voss, go to the blackboard and tell me about the history of the earth and its principal geological ages.”

While he was standing there thinking up his answers, his hands behind his back, I was watching you out of one eye. The sun fell on your black hair, and on your hands with their bitten nails; your shadow spread over the book you were looking at, you spent a long time over a rather blurred photograph of the Grand Canyon that had a black spot in the middle, so heavy and irregular it looked as if you had made it yourself;

and your Uncle Henri was already on the other side of the wall behind me, with his senior French students, asking one of pupils to begin with the death of Monseigneur, Dauphin of France:


“I found all Versailles gathered there . . .”

frowning when he corrected mistakes, tapping his pencil point on the yellow wood of the desk that like my own was already pitted with little dents, the same way he corrected your mistakes last hour, after collecting your first French compositions on this ultraclassical subject:

“Describe the one day of your vacation that has left the strongest impression in your memory; try to explain why it was this day that seems most memorable.”

He questioned some of you about Rabelais’ life and works, asked for a volunteer to explain Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel, and selected you from among those who raised their hands, saying in a tone of voice he wanted to sound particularly severe, without looking at you:

“All right, Eller, show us what you know.”

You wondered if you were supposed to read the paragraph in small type, where the editor provided some information about the nature and content of the selection:

asterisk, “having become a student, Pantagruel attends the various French universities . . .”,

or else:

triangle, “Most of the chapters devoted to Pantagruel’s studies. . .”,

or else:

circle, “A more elaborate program will be found in Gargantua; here is the wit itself. . .”,

but suddenly, just as you were going to ask your question, you found yourself facing this uncle, and you stopped, disturbed, no longer sure how to address him, realizing you would have to say “Monsieur” and not be able to, blushing, looking down, rushing through your reading most wildly, pronouncing the words indistinctly, disregarding the punctuation:


“Now it is the minds of men are qualified with all manner of discipline, and the old sciences revised, which for many ages were extinct: now it is that the learned languages are to their Sistine purity restored . . .”


“Eller, please pay attention to the text; start that sentence over again.”

“Now it is that the minds of men . . .”

“That’s better.”

“Are qualified with all manner of discipline, and the old sciences revived, which for many ages were extinct: now it is that the learned languages are to their pristine purity restored . . .”

“Go on.”

“Viz., Greek, without which a man may be ashamed to fall . . .”

“To what?”

“To call himself a scholar, Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean and Latin. Printing likewise is now abused . . .”

“Careful!”

“Is now in use, so elegant, and so correct . . .”

In the classroom directly underneath, I was explaining to your seventh-grade schoolmates, in front of the map of ancient Egypt that one of them had brought in from the superintendent’s office,

that we knew the ancient civilization of this country from the monuments it had left, pyramids, hypogea, mastabas, obelisks like the one in the Place de la Concorde,

how Champollion had managed to decipher the hieroglyphics thanks to the Rosetta Stone (Rosetta was a city), now in the British Museum in London, immediately extending our history several thousand years back into time,

how the pharaoh of the first dynasty, Menes, had combined the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, of the valley and the delta, the red and the white, the vulture and the kite,

how this long series of kings and conversions was divided into three chief periods, the Old, the Middle and the New Kingdom,

before coming upstairs to meet your class here,

where I continue calling the roll:

“Jourdan? Absent too? Oh, no, there you are. Speak up! What were you dreaming about? Knorr?”

(he was absent yesterday too),

“He hasn’t come back? All right. Limours?”

“Here.”

“Mouron?”

Sitting in front of you in the first row, Limours casually arranges on his desk his spiral-bound notebook and his second hand history book, on the first page of which he carefully crosses out the former owner’s name with his ballpoint pen, in order to write his own,

he too a pupil, this year, of one of his uncles, Monsieur Bailly, who at this moment is making his seniors on the floor above read Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

(Chapman: 1559-1634):


“ . . . Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like a stout Cortez”


(Cortez, or Cortes: 1485-1547),


“when with eagle eyes
he star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”


(Darien: southernmost part of the isthmus of Panama),

a first cousin of both Monsieur Mouron, father of Alain Mouron who is in this class, and of Madame Daval siting to your right, who is leaning over to ask you for a blotter, because his ink bottle, badly corked, has begun to leak all over his hands.