What I saw from the two windows was not enough for me. I wanted to see farther, into the very classroom. My wish was satisfied. It was the end of the scholastic year. A stage ahead in the regular work, I had just obtained my certificate. I was free. A few weeks remain before the holidays. Shall I go and spend them out of doors, in all the gaiety of my eighteen summers? No, I will spend them at the school which, for two years past, has provided me with an untroubled roof and my daily crust. I will wait until a post is found for me. Employ my willing service as you think fit, do with me what you will: as long as I can study, I am indifferent to the rest.
The principal of the school, the soul of kindness, has grasped my passion for knowledge. He encourages me in my determination; he proposes to make me renew my acquaintance with Horace and Virgil, so long since forgotten. He knows Latin, he does; he will rekindle the dead spark by making me translate a few passages. He does more: he lends me an Imitation with parallel texts in Latin and Greek. With the first text, which I am almost able to read, I will puzzle out the second and thus increase the small vocabulary which I acquired in the days when I was translating Aesop's Fables. It will be all the better for my future studies. What luck! Board and lodging, ancient poetry, the classical languages, all the good things at once!
I did better still. Our science master--the real, not the honorary one--who came twice a week to discourse of the rule of three and the properties of the triangle, had the brilliant idea of letting us celebrate the end of the school year with a feast of learning.
He promised to show us oxygen. As a colleague of the chemist in the grammar school, he obtained leave to take us to the famous laboratory and there to handle the object of his lesson under our very eyes. Oxygen, yes, oxygen, the all-consuming gas; that was what we were to see on the morrow. I could not sleep all night for thinking of it.
Thursday afternoon came at last. As soon as the chemistry lesson is over, we were to go for a walk to Les Angles, the pretty village over yonder, perched on a steep rock. We were therefore in our Sunday best, our out-of-doors clothes: black frock coats and tall hats. The whole school was there, some thirty of us, in the charge of an usher, who knew as little as we did of the things which we were about to see. We crossed the threshold of the laboratory, not without excitement. I entered a great nave with a Gothic roof, an old, bare church through which one's voice echoed, into which the light penetrated discreetly through stained glass windows set in ribs and rosettes of stone. At the back were huge raised benches, with room for an audience of many hundreds; at the other end, where the choir once was, stood an enormous chimney mantel; in the middle was a large, massive table, corroded by the chemicals. At one end of this table was a tarred tub, lined inside with lead and filled with water. This, I at once learned, was the pneumatic trough, the vessel in which the gases were collected.
The professor begins the experiment. He takes a sort of large, long glass bulb, bent abruptly in the region of the neck. This, he informs us, is a retort. He pours into it, from a screw of paper, some black stuff that looks like powdered charcoal. This is manganese dioxide, the master tells us. It contains in abundance, in a condensed state and retained by combination with the metal, the gas which we propose to obtain. An oily looking liquid, sulfuric acid, an excessively powerful agent, will set it at liberty. Thus filled, the retort is placed on a lighted stove. Aglass tube brings it into communication with a bell jar full of water on the shelf of the pneumatic trough. Those are all the preparations. What will be the result? We must wait for the action of heat.
My fellow pupils gather eagerly round the apparatus, cannot come close enough to it. Some of them play the part of the fly on the wheel and glory in contributing to the success of the experiment.
They straighten the retort, which is leaning to one side; they blow with their mouths on the coals in the stove. I do not care for these familiarities with the unknown. The good natured master raises no objection; but I have never been able to endure the thronging of a crowd of gapers, who are very busy with their elbows and force their way to the front row to see whatever is happening, even though it be merely a couple of mongrels fighting. Let us withdraw and leave these officious ones to themselves. There is so much to see here, while the oxygen is being prepared. Let us make the most of the occasion and take a look round the chemist's arsenal.
Under the spacious chimney mantel is a collection of queer stoves, bound round with bands of sheet iron. There are long and short ones, high and low ones, all pierced with little windows that are closed with a terracotta shutter. This one, a sort of little tower, is formed of several parts placed one above the other and each supplied with big round handles to hold them by when you take the monument to pieces. A dome, with an iron chimney, tops the whole edifice, which must be capable of producing a very hell fire to roast a stone of no significance. Another, a squat one, stretches out like a curved spine. It has a round hole at either end; and a thick porcelain tube sticks out from each. It is impossible to conceive the purpose which such instruments as these can serve. The seekers of the philosopher's stone must have had many like them. They are torturers' engines, tearing the metals' secrets from them.
