A few months after the incident of the vitriol bomb, I was sent to Carpentras to take charge of junior classes at the college there. The first year was a difficult one, swamped as I was by the excessive number of pupils, a set of duffers kept out of the more advanced classes and all at different stages in spelling and grammar. Next year, my school is divided into two; I have an assistant. A weeding-out takes place in my crowd of scatterbrains. I keep the older, the more intelligent ones; the others are to have a term in the preparatory division. From that day forward, things are different. Curriculum there is none. In those happy times, the master's personality counted for something; there was no such thing as the scholastic piston working with the regularity of a machine. It was left for me to act as I thought fit. Well, what should I do to make the school earn its title of 'upper primary'? Why, of course! Among other things, I shall do some chemistry! My reading has taught me that it does no harm to know a little chemistry, if you would make your furrows yield a good return. Many of my pupils come from the country; they will go back to it to improve their land. Let us show them what the soil is made of and what the plant feeds on. Others will follow industrial careers; they will become tanners, metal founders, distillers; they will sell cakes of soap and kegs of anchovies. Let us show them pickling, soap making, stills, tannin and metals. Of course, I know nothing about these things, but I shall learn, all the more so as I shall have to teach them to the boys; and your schoolboy is a little demon for jeering at the master's hesitation. As it happens, the college boasts a small laboratory, containing just what is strictly indispensable: a receiver, a dozen glass balloons, a few tubes and a niggardly assortment of chemicals. That will do, if I can have the run of it. But the laboratory is a sanctum reserved for the use of the sixth form. No one sets foot in it except the professor and his pupils preparing for their degree. For me, the outsider, to enter that tabernacle with my band of young imps would be most unseemly; the rightful occupant would never think of allowing it. I feel it myself: elementary teaching dare not aspire to such familiarity with the higher culture. Very well, we will not go there, so long as they will lend me the things.