Page:Two Architects of New Europe – Masaryk and Beneš.pdf/9

Rh at this time is the fact that he was a member of the worst, most unruly class which the school ever had. In fact, so much did it earn the wrath of its teachers that the latter broke a time-honored custom when they refused to have themselves photographed with the class on graduation.

But the future diplomat did not exhibit enthusiasm in that direction alone. From his brother, Václav, with whom he lived in a suburb of Prague, he learned to view life both liberally and seriously, for Václav was a socialist. Edward, to the uncomfortable disappointment of many of his wildest companions, was a teetotaler, and he did not smoke.

When he matriculated at the University of Prague he signed up for Romance languages and Germanic philology and became an able linguist. It is no concealed fact that his opponents at the Peace Conference complained that he could deliver speeches and write memoirs in all the major languages used there. But under the spell of Thomas G. Masaryk, then professor of social philosophy at Prague University, he transferred his affections from philology to philosophy and to the social sciences. Here he listened especially to Professor Masaryk's lectures on the Russian revolution of 1905 and on revolutions in general—an expansion of which has been translated from the German into English under the title of The Spirit of Russia.

In 1905 he left Prague and its University and journeyed to Paris. Here he became a student at the Sorbonne and at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. Later he registered also in the law faculty at Dijon and in the "Russian University" at Paris. He had to make his way in France by writing for certain Czech newspapers and magazines. As a result, his whole correspondence is filled with the one desire to get time to study deeper and more thoroughly, which his hack-writing interfered with until he virtually broke in health.

Though these three years he spent in France were filled with poverty and misery, in his own words, he "learned to look on the world in a different light" from what he used to in Prague. Paris became for him "the synthesis of France and France the synthesis of modern Westernism." He