Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/100



SCATTERED all over France, located mainly at the county-seats, are the lycees, or government schools, which include the primary and intermediate grades as well as college courses. They are public, though not free, institutions of learning, collectively constituting the French University, attended by the well-to-do and by the few who can obtain government scholarships.

The name is an old one, dating from the palmy days of Athens, when Aristotle taught his philosophy to eager disciples and followers in covered alleys to the east of the town near the river Ilissus, and called the place the Lyceum. As this was also a place for athletic culture, so it was that Napoleon First, who organized the French University on the lines since followed with little deviation, created these lycees, that they might give mental and physical training to the children of his marshals and generals, and those of the middle classes. Napoleon gave to these schools a strong military bent, and aimed as much at keeping alive the mar- tial spirit as imparting a liberal educa- tion to the young scholars.

Victor Hugo expresses the original spirit of the institutions in the following noble lines:

""Vous etes les enfants des belliqueuux lycees!

La vous applaudissez nos victolres passees.""

The students to this day wear uniforms, live in huge barrack-like buildings, answer to a strict military discipline, and from early morn until bed-time they must come and go to the beating of a big drum. A martial spirit still pervades the lycees, and the ghost of monasticism, as well, hovers over them; for the buildings themselves, once monasteries of the Church of Rome, were a part of the vast holdings confiscated in 1793 by the French government, turned over to the French University and assigned to young collegians.

Lately, money has been spent on new buildings more in keeping with modern ideas of college architecture, but fifteen or twenty years ago the approach to these colleges was forbidding, the halls were anything but cheerful, the corridors long, dark and dismal, the rooms cheerless, cold and bare, the windows small and iron-barred, and the yards, where all phys- ical exercise took place and the recesses were spent, were sunless and treeless courts entombed by high walls. To escape from these prisons to the street and min- gle with the live, active world, a couple of doors had to be unlocked and the gaunt- let run past an ever-watchful doorkeeper, whom the boys appropriately named "Cerberus."

The Lycee Henri IV, for instance, is an ancient abblaye of Genovefains, and the main staircase, the cloister of the court, named after Victor Duruy, the great min- ister and historian, most of the dormito- ries, some of the study-rooms, the very college chapel, vividly recall former times and scenes enacted in the old convent.

The administration proper of the lycee is carried out by four men, all very dig- nified and distant. The president, to whom all respectfully bow, has a general supervision over everything about the col- lege premises, from the kitchen to the drawing-room, and is the inspector of classes. The censeur, or vice-president, confines himself more to the discipline of the school, and is aided by the head usher, a man more feared than loved by the boys, who goes by the title of "surveillant general." That individual never sleeps nor grows weary, is ubiquitous and always at your heels. Avoid him as you will, he runs across you; hide yourself as you will, he ferrets you out; seclude yourself as much as you please, he will scent you be- fore your cigarette is half consumed.

The fourth figure in the administration wears an official title that does not rec- ommend him to the students, 1'econome,