profiles instinct with hatred and suffering.
There was the head master, who ruined himself in giving parties, in
order to marry his daughters--two tall, elegant girls, the butt of
constant and abominable insults, written and sketched on every wall;
there was the comptroller Pifard, whose wonderful nose betrayed his
presence behind every door, when he went eavesdropping; and there were
all the teachers, each befouled with some insulting nickname: the severe
'Rhadamantus,' who had never been seen to smile; 'Filth,' who by the
constant rubbing of his head had left his mark on the wall behind
every professional seat he occupied; 'Thou-hast-deceived-me-Adele,'
the professor of physics, at whom ten generations of schoolboys had
tauntingly flung the name of his unfaithful wife. There were others
still: Spontini, the ferocious usher, with his Corsican knife, rusty
with the blood of three cousins; little Chantecaille, who was so
good-natured that he allowed the pupils to smoke when out walking; and
also a scullion and a scullery maid, two ugly creatures who had been
nicknamed Paraboulomenos and Paralleluca, and who were accused of
kissing one another over the vegetable parings.

Then came comical reminiscences; the sudden recollection of practical
jokes, at which they shook with laughter after all those years. Oh!
the morning when they had burned the shoes of Mimi-la-Mort, _alias_ the
Skeleton Day Boarder, a lank lad, who smuggled snuff into the school for
the whole of the form. And then that winter evening when they had bagged
some matches lying near the lamp in the chapel, in order to smoke dry
chestnut leaves in reed pipes. Sandoz, who had been the ringleader on
that occasion, now frankly avowed his terror; the cold perspiration
that had come upon him when he had scrambled out of the choir, wrapt
in darkness. And again there was the day when Claude had hit upon the
sublime idea of roasting some cockchafers in his desk to see whether
they were good to eat, as people said they were. So terrible had been
the stench, so dense the smoke that poured from the desk, that the usher
had rushed to the water pitcher, under the impression that the place was
on fire. And then their marauding expeditions; the pillaging of onion
beds while they were out walking; the stones thrown at windows,
the correct thing being to make the breakage resemble a well-known
geographical map. Also the Greek exercises, written beforehand in large
characters on