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Remembering Lycée Teachers from the Early DaysGabrielle Griswold '44This touching article continues the remembrances Gabrielle shared with us in our last Newsletter. We are very pleased to bring you the latest installment. When I look back upon my days at the Lycée during the school's earliest years (I attended from 1938 through 1941), one of the things I recall is the excellence of the education we all received — an education far in advance of anything offered in approximately-equivalent American schools then (and probably now). Exciting subjects For instance, by the time I was 16, we had already read and studied no less than ten of Shakespeare's plays, read and studied in their entirety Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village," Dickens' "David Copperfield," Longfellow's "The Courtship of Myles Standish," Whittier's "Snowbound," not to mention numerous plays by Molière, Corneille and Racine, stories by Washington Irving, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, selections from Pepys' diary, from the essays of Francis Bacon, Emerson, and Addison and Steele, plus a great deal of classic English, French and American poetry. (The "Oxford Book of English Verse" was one of our textbooks.) We also memorized and recited aloud in class many passages from Shakespeare, many poems by classic French, English and American poets, and other texts, such as Lincoln's Gettysburg address and the first part of the Declaration of Independence — (even some texts in Latin. I remember that one night I actually dreamt I was memorizing a sequence of verses from the Aeneid!) Some of those poems and passages I can still recite today. In Sixième, our wonderful English teacher, Miss Gladys Peacock, taught us about iambs, trochees, iambic pentameter, and some of the different sonnet forms. I doubt whether any American students of our age were learning, as we were, about the forms of poetry, or even knew any of their names. We studied ancient history, the history of Europe, the history of civilization, American history; biology, zoology, botany, Latin (of course!), Greek (optional; I took it for a while), Spanish, math, physics, chemistry, music, drawing, and more. How boring, therefore, it seemed to me, when I later transferred to an American high school, to find myself studying the same five subjects at the exact same times on all five days of the school week! What a tedious routine compared to the academic stimulation of the Lycée, where we might study eight, ten or more different subjects in a single week. Wonderful teachers I don't know how it is at the Lycée now but at the time I speak of all our textbooks were in French and all our teachers taught in French, with the exception of English language/literature and American history, which were taught in English from English texts. Much of the excitement of our learning then I attribute to the superlative teachers whom the Lycée employed: absolutely the best of the best, all highly qualified, highly motivated, and highly motivating to us in turn whom their own zeal inspired to love not only learning itself but the process of learning. I've mentioned Miss Peacock, who taught us English in Sixième and was marvelously inspiring in every respect. Later English teachers I would enjoy were Mr. Lowe and Mr. Lavallee, also exceptionally good. Mme. Bégué for French was another dream-come-true teacher, incredibly committed, always encouraging, capable of both seriousness and humor, a teacher born and bred. Tiny, plump little Mme. Correa was a dynamo in action. She taught both math and science to several different grade- and age-levels, and seemed an indefatigable crusader in these fields. Hers were not my favorite subjects, but they were exceedingly well-taught, and I nonetheless enjoyed them and did well in them. M. Deschamps taught us math in Sixième and possibly later, although I don't remember him after that. He was movie-star handsome, with fine, delicate features, and always appeared very retiring and shy. Perhaps this came from self-consciousness about his looks, which I understand caused some of the girl students (and presumably a répétitrice named Miss Glass) to have serious "crushes" on him. I was not one of those. (Actually, few of the girls of my age had any real interest in the male sex, unless it were abstractly and from afar, as with movie stars like Laurence Olivier and Errol Flynn, my own particular film heroes. Some of us liked some of the boys better than others, and some of them liked us, but I don't recall any actual "dating" taking place outside of school.) Mme. Sylvie Brodin was another teacher we all enjoyed. She taught us geography and after-school subjects as well, such as drama and music. Both Lizzie [ Elizabeth (Bertol) Moon] and I performed in a play she directed, called "Les Deux Mendiants" (Lizzie and I were the two mendiants), and in a later year Eleanor Cramer, another close friend, and I took recorder lessons from her. Then there was art teacher, M. Gallet, who taught us drawing in a spacious, airy classroom, to which we also repaired for solfeggio. I don't remember much about the music teacher, but M. Gallet was tall and imposing, and always had a large sign posted on the wall to remind us that "Observer, c'est voir. Voir, c'est savoir." The ultimate, quintessential teacher was, of course, Mme. Marie-Andrée d'Oberlin Mount, who taught French, Latin, and — life. She was a teacher to the bone, a thoroughgoing teacher in every sense of the word, to whom no effort was too great in her commitment to the education of her students. She was devoted to us, to the school, to learning in general, and put in long hours not only at school but after school. It would have been impossible not to be motivated when Mme. Mount was teaching you. (She also taught an after-school sewing class, was always willing to provide extra tutoring for those who needed it, and came up with innovative ideas for the school, as for instance when she instituted a patriotic program whereby students who bought War Bond stamps would be forgiven any bad grades they might have incurred.) Now that I am back in touch with Elizabeth, one of my closest friends during our Lycée days, I find that she too remembers the same teachers I do as being most outstanding. No more than I can she forget Mme. Bégué, Mme. Brodin, Mme. Correa, nor — above all — Mme. Mount. Two not-quite-so-wonderful teachers During my first year at the Lycée, when I was in the Classe de Sixième, a member of the school staff was one M. Soulas (or Soula). He was variously called a "surveillant" or "répétiteur," otherwise said a sort of proctor, who didn't actually (to my knowledge, anyway) teach classes but supervised us during assorted activities, such as recreations and study halls. Far from being popular, he was generally dreaded and was often (secretly or not so secretly) referred to as "Sourpuss." One day in Sixième, I passed a note to François Lee, who sat next to me, on which I'd written words to the effect that "Sourpuss seems especially grumpy today." To my dismay, François noisily crumpled up the note, snorting aloud as he did so, at which sound M. Soulas jumped up from his desk at the front of the class and came to tower over François. "Qu'est-ce que vous avez là?" he demanded to know. François handed him the note. "Qui a écrit ça?" M. Soulas asked, frowning around at us all. Defiantly, I shot up my hand, expecting punishment or at least a scolding. But to my surprise M. Soulas simply grunted and returned to his desk. Another time, he caught me going up the back staircase after hours, which was forbidden unless one had permission (and I had not). I'd left a textbook in the Sixième classroom and, after lunch, decided entirely on my own that I would nip quickly upstairs and retrieve it. Imagine my chagrin when I looked up and saw M. Soulas descending the stairs, who sternly asked, "Où allez-vous?" I wasn't normally impertinent, but I was determined not to let him intimidate me as he did everyone else, so I answered slowly, in a level tone, "Je vais quelque part — chercher quelque chose — pour quelqu'un" — a truthful answer if an evasive one. Of course M. Soula demanded a more precise explanation, which I then gave him in a reasonable, matter-of-fact manner. Once again to my surprise he did not react negatively, but waved me on upstairs, saying, "Alors, montez vite, and redescendez immediatement." Which I did. After that, although we never exchanged any further words, whenever our eyes chanced to meet a fleeting gleam always seemed to pass between us, a sort of look of tacit understanding, as though each was satisfied at having taken the measure of the other. He never scolded me, never punished me, and of course I was careful not to test him again. On balance, I could only assume that perhaps he privately relished the fact that one student at least had stood up to him. Sometime thereafter World War II having begun in Europe in September of that first year, M. Soulas left the school to go fight in France. For a time, I wrote to him, but eventually the mails became unreliable and our correspondence ceased. I did not learn whether he had survived the war until years later when I read in a 1959 Lycée publication, giving capsule news of former students and teachers, that he was then the "Chef du Cabinet du Recteur de l’Université de Lyon." How relieved I was to know this! A teacher of a different stripe was Mme. Day-Mondain, who taught Greek, an optional course. A quick learner of languages and loving Latin, I was eager to acquire at least the rudiments of another ancient tongue, so in Troisième I signed up for the course, one of about only half-a-dozen students who did so. Of that tiny class, held in a tiny closet-like room, the only student I remember besides myself was Raoul Grenade, who was something of a humorist and a quiet clown. Mme. Day-Mondain had the strange habit of occasionally disappearing from the classroom (sometimes even in the middle of exams) to dash off to the teachers' room for a quick cigarette, leaving us to our own devices. Seemingly not too interested in the course she was supposed to be teaching, she often hardly appeared to notice us even when she remained in out midst. In return, we did mischievous things in her class that we would not have dreamed of doing in any other. I remember that one day, when she wasn't looking, Raoul spent part of class time crumbling up little bits of art eraser, which he dipped lightly in the inkwell atop his desk and then sent zinging around the room with a slingshot. I, on the other hand, brought coconuts into the classroom a couple of times, surreptitiously split them open with a hammer, poured off the milk into a glass which I circulated to my fellow students to sip from, then broke the coconut into pieces, which I also circulated. Mme. Day-Mondain never seemed to hear the hammer blows or notice the constant undercurrent of chatter that habitually prevailed in her class, and she never called anyone to task for any of these things. In due course, we either tired of such monkeyshines and stopped performing them, or left the class — as I did, feeling that I was learning nothing. These two exceptions aside, our teachers were dedicated and inspiring, our textbooks full of interest (I still have two of them), and the curriculum most wonderfully stimulating. I continue to believe today that, in the four very happy years I spent at the Lycée, I learned many things that most of my American contemporaries would not learn until they entered college, and not always even then. Assuming that the quality of education at the Lycée today is as good as it was in those early days, it must assuredly still be a unique privilege to attend such a school. |
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