Once more, here am I, somewhat late in life, at Carpentras, whose rude Gallic name sets the fool smiling and the scholar thinking. Dear little town where I spent my twentieth year and left the first bits of my fleece upon life’s bushes, my visit of to-day is a pilgrimage; I have come to lay my eyes once more upon the place which saw the birth of the liveliest impressions of my early days. I bow, in passing, to the old College where I tried my prentice hand as a teacher. Its appearance is unchanged; it still looks like a penitentiary. Those were the views of our mediæval educational system. To the gaiety and activity of boyhood, which were considered unwholesome, it applied the remedy of narrowness, melancholy, and gloom. Its houses of instruction were, above all, houses of correction. The freshness of Virgil was interpreted in the stifling atmosphere of a prison. I catch a glimpse of a yard between four high walls, a sort of bear-pit, where the scholars fought for room for their games under the spreading branches of a plane-tree. All around were cells that looked like horse-boxes, without light or air; those were the class-rooms. I speak in the past tense, for doubtless the present day has seen the last of this academic destitution. Here is the tobacco-shop where, on Wednesday evening, coming out of the college, I would buy on credit the wherewithal to fill my pipe and thus to celebrate on the eve the joys of the morrow, that blessed Thursday [38] which I considered so well employed in solving difficult equations, experimenting with new chemical reagents, collecting and identifying my plants. I made my timid request, pretending to have come out without my money, for it is hard for a self-respecting man to admit that he is penniless. My candour appears to have inspired some little confidence; and I obtained credit, an unprecedented thing, with the representative of the revenue. How I should love to see that room again where I pored over differentials and integrals, where I calmed my poor burning head by gazing at Mont Ventoux, whose summit held in store for my coming expedition [39] those denizens of Arctic climes, the saxifrage and the poppy! And to see my familiar friend, the blackboard, which I hired at five francs a year from a crusty joiner, that board whose value I paid many times over, though I could never buy it outright, for want of the necessary cash! The conic sections which I described on that blackboard, the learned hieroglyphics! [40]