The primary schoolmasters groaned under the heavy yoke of the prefects. “These deep politicians only know how to dismiss.... The rectors will become the valets of the prefects ...” wrote Pasteur with anger and distress in a letter dated July, 1850. After the primary schools, the attacks now reached the colleges. The University was accused of attending exclusively to Latin verse and Greek translations, and of neglecting the souls of the students. Romieu, who ironically dubbed the University “Alma Parens,” and attacked it most bitterly, seemed hardly fitted for the part of justiciary. He was a former pupil of the Ecole Polytechnique, who wrote vaudevilles until he was made a prefect by Louis Philippe. He was celebrated for various tricks which amused Paris and disconcerted the Government, much to the joy of the Prince de Joinville,[21] who loved such mystifications. After the fall of Louis Philippe, Romieu became a totally different personality. He had been supposed to take nothing seriously; he now put a tragic construction on everything. He became a prophet of woe, declaring that “gangrene was devouring the souls of eight year old children.” According to him, faith, respect, all was being destroyed; he anathematized Instruction without Education, and stigmatized village schoolmasters as “obscure apostles” charged with “preaching the doctrines of revolt.” This violence was partly oratory, but oratory does not minimize violence, it excites it. Every pamphleteer ends by being a bond-slave to his own phraseology. When Romieu appeared in Strasburg as an Envoy Extraordinary entrusted by the Government with a general inquiry, he found that M. Laurent did not answer to that ideal of a functionary which was entertained by a certain party. M. Laurent had the very highest respect for justice; he distrusted the upstarts whose virtues were very much on the surface; he never decided on the fate of an inferior without the most painstaking inquiry; he did not look on an accidental mistake as an unpardonable fault; he refused to take any immediate and violent measures: all this caused him to be looked upon with suspicion. “The influence of the Rector” (thus ran Romieu’s official report) “is hardly, if at all, noticeable. He should be replaced by a safe man.” The Minister of Public Instruction, M. de Parieu, had to bow before the formal wish of the Minister of the Interior, founded upon peremptory arguments of this kind. M. Laurent was offered the post of Rector at Châteauroux, a decided step downward. He refused, left Strasburg, and, with no complaint or recriminations, retired into private life at the age of fifty-five.