The glass things are arranged on shelves. I see retorts of different sizes, all with necks bent at a sudden angle. In addition to their long beak, some of them have a narrow little tube coming out of their bulb. Look, youngster, and do not try to guess the object of these curious vessels. I see glasses with feet to them, funnel-shaped and deep; I stand amazed at strange looking bottles with two or three mouths to each, at phials swelling into a balloon with a long, narrow tube. What an odd array of implements!
And here are glass cupboards with a host of bottles and jars, filled with all manner of chemicals. The labels apprise me of their contents: molybdenite of ammonia, chloride of antimony, permanganate of potash and ever so many other strange terms.
Never, in all my reading, have I met with such repellent language.
Suddenly, bang! And there is running and stamping and shouting and cries of pain! What has happened? I rush up from the back of the room. The retort has burst, squirting its boiling vitriol in every direction. The wall opposite is all stained with it. Most of my fellow pupils have been more or less struck. One poor youth has had the splashes full in his face, right into his eyes. He is yelling like a madman. With the help of a friend who has come off better than the others, I drag him outside by main force, take him to the sink, which fortunately is close at hand, and hold his face under the tap. This swift ablution serves its purpose. The horrible pain begins to be allayed, so much so that the sufferer recovers his senses and is able to continue the washing process for himself.
My prompt aid certainly saved his sight. A week later, with the help of the doctor's lotions, all danger was over. How lucky it was that I took it into my head to keep some way off! My isolation, as I stood looking into the glass case of chemicals, left me all my presence of mind, all my readiness of resource. What are the others doing, those who got splashed through standing too near the chemical bomb? I return to the lecture hall. It is not a cheerful spectacle. The master has come off badly: his shirtfront, waistcoat and trousers are covered with smears, which are all smoldering and burning into holes. He hurriedly divests himself of a portion of his dangerous raiment. Those of us who possess the smartest clothes lend him something to put on so that he can go home decently.
One of the tall, funnel-shaped glasses which I was admiring just now is standing, full of ammonia, on the table. All, coughing and sniveling, dip their handkerchiefs into it and rub the moist rag over their hats and coats. In this way, the red stains left by the horrible compound are made to disappear. A drop of ink will presently restore the color completely.
And the oxygen? There was no more question, I need hardly say, of that. The feast of learning was over. Never mind: the disastrous lesson was a mighty event for me. I had been inside the chemist's laboratory; I had had a glimpse of those wonderful jars and tubes.
In teaching, what matters most is not the thing taught, whether well or badly grasped: it is the stimulus given to the pupil's latent aptitudes; it is the fulminate awakening the slumbering explosives. One day, I shall obtain on my own account that oxygen which ill luck has denied me; one day, without a master, I shall yet learn chemistry.
Yes, I shall learn this chemistry, which started so disastrously.
And how? By teaching it. I do not recommend that method to anybody. Happy the man who is guided by a master's word and example! He has a smooth and easy road before him, lying straight ahead. The other follows a rugged path, in which his feet often stumble; he goes groping into the unknown and loses his way. To recover the right road, if want of success have not discouraged him, he can rely only on perseverance, the sole compass of the poor. Such was my fate. I taught myself by teaching others, by passing on to them the modicum of seed that had ripened on the barren moor cleared, from day to day, by my patient plowshare.
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, Iknow 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.
