One of the tall, funnel-shaped glasses which I was admiring just now is standing, full of ammonia, on the table. All, coughing and snivelling, dip their handkerchiefs into it and rub the moist rag over their hats and coats. In this way the red stains left by the horrible compound are made to disappear. A drop of ink will presently restore the colour completely. And the oxygen? There was no more question, I need hardly say, of that. The feast of learning was over. Never mind: the disastrous lesson was a mighty event for me. I had been inside the chemist’s laboratory; I had had a glimpse of those wonderful jars and tubes. In teaching what matters most is not the thing taught, whether well or badly grasped: it is the stimulus given to the pupil’s latent aptitudes; it is the fulminate awaking the slumbering explosives. One day, I shall obtain on my own account that oxygen which ill-luck has denied me; one day, without a master, I shall yet learn chemistry. I do not recommend that method to anybody. Happy the man who is guided by a master’s word and example! He has a smooth and easy road before him, lying straight ahead. The other follows a rugged path, in which his feet often stumble; he goes groping into the unknown and loses his way. To recover the right road, if want of success have not discouraged him, he can rely only on perseverance, the sole compass of the poor. [30] We shall show what the perseverance of this son of Aveyron peasants was capable of achieving, and after realising how little he got from his masters we shall marvel to see what he acquired by dint of personal industry and application. CHAPTER VII THE SCHOOLMASTER: CARPENTRAS Only eighteen years old, he left the Normal College with his diploma, his brevet supérieur, and began his career as primary schoolmaster in the College of Carpentras. Merit, it seems, was recognised, and at the outset fortune did not treat him so badly. We may judge of this the better from the picture which the ex-schoolmaster has given us of his first beginnings at the College: It was when I first began to teach, about 1843. I had left the Normal School at Vaucluse some months before, with my diploma and all the simple enthusiasm of my eighteen years, and had been sent to Carpentras, there to manage the primary school attached to the College. It was a strange school, upon my word, notwithstanding its pompous title of “upper”; a sort of huge cellar oozing with the perpetual damp engendered by a well backing on it in the street outside. For light there was the open door, when the weather permitted, and a narrow prison-window, with iron bars and lozenge panes set in lead. By way of benches there was a plank fastened to the wall all round the room, while in the middle was a chair bereft of its straw, a blackboard and a stick of chalk.