ough answers to the questions surged up fast,
my mind filling like a rising well, ideas were there, but not words. I
either _could_ not, or _would_ not speak--I am not sure which: partly,
I think, my nerves had got wrong, and partly my humour was crossed.

I heard one of my examiners--he of the braided surtout--whisper to his
co-professor, "Est-elle donc idiote?"

"Yes," I thought, "an idiot she is, and always will be, for such as
you."

But I suffered--suffered cruelly; I saw the damps gather on M. Paul's
brow, and his eye spoke a passionate yet sad reproach. He would not
believe in my total lack of popular cleverness; he thought I _could_ be
prompt if I _would_.

At last, to relieve him, the professors, and myself, I stammered out:

"Gentlemen, you had better let me go; you will get no good of me; as
you say, I am an idiot."

I wish I could have spoken with calm and dignity, or I wish my sense
had sufficed to make me hold my tongue; that traitor tongue tripped,
faltered. Beholding the judges cast on M. Emanuel a hard look of
triumph, and hearing the distressed tremor of my own voice, out I burst
in a fit of choking tears. The emotion was far more of anger than
grief; had I been a man and strong, I could have challenged that pair
on the spot--but it _was_ emotion, and I would rather have been
scourged than betrayed it.

The incapables! Could they not see at once the crude hand of a novice
in that composition they called a forgery? The subject was classical.
When M. Paul dictated the trait on which the essay was to turn, I heard
it for the first time; the matter was new to me, and I had no material
for its treatment. But I got books, read up the facts, laboriously
constructed a skeleton out of the dry bones of the real, and then
clothed them, and tried to breathe into them life, and in this last aim
I had pleasure. With me it was a difficult and anxious time till my
facts were found, selected, and properly jointed; nor could I rest from
research and effort till I was satisfied of correct anatomy; the
strength of my inward repugnance to the idea of flaw or falsity
sometimes enabled me to shun egregious blunders; but the knowledge was
not there in my head, ready and mellow; it had not been sown in Spring,
grown in Summer, harvested in Autumn, and garnered through Winter;
whatever I wanted I must go out and gather fresh; glean of wild herbs
my lapful, and shred them green into the pot. Messieurs Boissec and
Rochem