“Your parents have not been careful enough to see that you were educated. They preferred to send you to work in the fields or in the factories, in order to have a few more sous. And have I nothing to reproach myself for? Have I not often made you water my garden instead of studying? And when I wanted to go fishing for trout, have I ever hesitated to dismiss you?”
Then, passing from one thing to another, Monsieur Hamel began to talk to us about the French
language, saying that it was the most beautiful language in the world, the most clear, the most
substantial; that we must always retain it among ourselves, and never forget it, because when a people
falls into servitude, “so long as it clings to its language, it is as if it held the key to its prison.” 1 Then he took the grammer and read us our lesson. I was amazed to see how readily I understood. Everything that he said seemed so easy to me, so easy. I believed, too, that I had never listened so closely, and that he, for his part, had never been so patient with his explanations. One would have said that, before going away, the poor man desired to give us all his knowledge, to force it all into our heads at a single blow.
When the lesson was at an end, we passed to writing. For that day Monsieur Hamel had prepared some entirely new examples, on which was written in a fine, round hand: “France, Alsace, France, Alsace.”
They were like little flags, waving all about the class, hanging from the rods of our desks. You should
have seen how hard we all worked and how silent it was! Nothing could be heard save the grinding of the pens over the paper. At one time some cock-chafers flew in; but no one paid any attention to them, not even the little fellows who were struggling with their straight lines, with a will and conscientious application, as if even the lines were French. On the roof of the schoolhouse, pigeons cooed in low tones, and I said to myself as I listened to them:
“I wonder if they are going to compel them to sing in German too!”
From time to time, when I raised my eyes from my paper. I saw Monsieur Hamel sitting motionless in his chair and staring at the objects about him as if he wished to carry away in his glance the whole of his little schoolhouse. Think of it! For forty years he had been there in the same place, with his yard in front of him and his class just as it was! But the benches and desks were polished and rubbed by use; the walnuts in the yard had grown, and the hop-vine which he himself had planted now festooned the windows even to the roof. What a heart-rending thing it must have been for that poor man to leave all those things, and to hear his sister walking back and forth in the room overhead, packing their trunks! For they were to go away the next day—to leave the province forever.
However, he had the courage to keep the class to the end. After the writing, we had the lesson in
history; then the little ones sang all together the ba, be, bi, bo, bu. Yonder, at the back of the room, old
Hauser had put on his spectacles, and, holding his spelling-book in both hands, he spelled out the letters with them. I could see that he too was applying himself. His voice shook with emotion, and it was so funny to hear him, that we all longed to laugh and to cry. Ah! I shall remember that last class.
Suddenly the church clock struck twelve, then the Angelus rang. At the same moment, the bugles of the Prussians returning from drill blared under our windows. Monsieur Hamel rose, pale as death, from his chair. Never had he seemed to me so tall.
“My friends,” he said, “my friends, I—I—”
But something suffocated him. He could not finish the sentence.
Thereupon he turned to the blackboard, took a piece of chalk, and, bearing on with all his might, he
wrote in the largest letters he could:
“VIVE LA FRANCE!”
Then he stood there, with his head resting against the wall, and without speaking, he motioned to us
with his hand:
“That is all; go.”
