FICTION
FROM THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.
“THE LAST LESSON”
By Alphonse Daudet
I started for school very late that morning and was in great dread of a
scolding, especially because M. Hamel had said that he would question us on
participles, and I did not know the first word about them. For a moment I
thought of running away and spending the day out of doors. It was so warm, so
bright! The birds were chirping at the edge of the woods; and in the open field
back of the sawmill the Prussian soldiers were drilling. It was all much more
tempting than the rule for participles, but I had the strength to resist, and
hurried off to school.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

When I passed the town hall
there was a crowd in front of the bulletin-board. For the last two years all
our bad news had come from there—the lost battles, the draft, the orders of the
commanding officer—and I thought to myself, without stopping:
“What can be the matter
now?”
Then, as I hurried by as
fast as I could go, the blacksmith, Wachter, who was there, with his
apprentice, reading the bulletin, called after me:
“Don’t go so fast, bub;
you’ll get to your school in plenty of time!”
I thought he was making fun
of me, and reached M. Hamel’s little garden all out of breath.
Usually, when school began,
there was a great bustle, which could be heard out in the street, the opening
and closing of desks, lessons repeated in unison, very loud, with our hands
over our ears to understand better, and the teacher’s great ruler rapping on
the table.
But now it was all so still!
I had counted on the
commotion to get to my desk without being seen; but, of course, that day
everything had to be as quiet as Sunday morning. Through the window I saw my
classmates, already in their places, and M. Hamel walking up and down with his
terrible iron ruler under his arm. I had to open the door and go in before
everybody. You can imagine how I blushed and how frightened I was.
But nothing happened. M.
Hamel saw me and said very kindly:
“Go to your place quickly,
little Franz. We were beginning without you.”
I jumped over the bench and
sat down at my desk. Not till then, when I had got a little over my fright, did
I see that our teacher had on his beautiful green coat, his frilled shirt, and
the little black silk cap, all embroidered, that he never wore except on
inspection and prize days. Besides, the whole school seemed so strange and
solemn.
But the thing that surprised
me most was to see, on the back benches that were always empty, the village
people sitting quietly like ourselves; old Hauser, with his three-cornered hat,
the former mayor, the former postmaster, and several others besides. Everybody
looked sad; and Hauser had brought an old primer, thumbed at the edges, and he
held it open on his knees with his great spectacles lying across the pages.
While I was wondering about
it all, M. Hamel mounted his chair, and, in the same grave and gentle tone
which he had used to me, said:
“My children, this is the
last lesson I shall give you. The order has come from Berlin to teach only
German in the schools of Alsace and Lorraine. The new master comes tomorrow.
This is your last French lesson. I want you to be very attentive.”
What a thunderclap these
words were to me!
Oh, the wretches; that was
what they had put up at the town-hall!
My last French lesson! Why,
I hardly knew how to write! I should never learn any more! I must stop there,
then! Oh, how sorry I was for not learning my lessons, for seeking birds’ eggs,
or going sliding on the Saar! My books, that had seemed such a nuisance a while
ago, so heavy to carry, my grammar, and my history of the saints, were old
friends now that I couldn’t give up. And M. Hamel, too; the idea that he was
going away, that I should never see him again, made me forget all about his
ruler and how cranky he was.
Poor man! It was in honor of
this last lesson that he had put on his fine Sunday clothes, and now I
understood why the old men of the village were sitting there in the back of the
room. It was because they were sorry, too, that they had not gone to school
more. It was their way of thanking our master for his forty years of faithful
service and of showing their respect for the country that was theirs no more.
While I was thinking of all
this, I heard my name called. It was my turn to recite. What would I not have
given to be able to say that dreadful rule for the participle all through, very
loud and clear, and without one mistake? But I got mixed up on the first words
and stood there, holding on to my desk, my heart beating, and not daring to
look up. I heard M. Hamel say to me:
“I won’t scold you, little
Franz; you must feel bad enough. See how it is! Every day we have said to
ourselves: ‘Bah! I’ve plenty of time. I’ll learn it to-morrow.’ And now you see
where we’ve come out. Ah, that’s the great trouble with Alsace; she puts off
learning till to-morrow. Now those fellows out there will have the right to say
to you: ‘How is it; you pretend to be Frenchmen, and yet you can neither speak
nor write your own language?’ But you are not the worst, poor little Franz.
We’ve all a great deal to reproach ourselves with.
“Your parents were not
anxious enough to have you learn. They preferred to put you to work on a farm
or at the mills, so as to have a little more money. And I? I’ve been to blame
also. Have I not often sent you to water my flowers instead of learning your
lessons? And when I wanted to go fishing, did I not just give you a holiday?”
Then, from one thing to
another, M. Hamel went on to talk of the French language, saying that it was
the most beautiful language in the world—the clearest, the most logical; that
we must guard it among us and never forget it, because when a people are
enslaved, as long as they hold fast to their language it is as if they had the
key to their prison.
Then he opened a grammar and
read us our lesson. I was amazed to see how well I understood it. All he said
seemed so easy, so easy! I think, too, that I had never listened so carefully,
and that he had never explained everything with so much patience. It seemed
almost as if the poor man wanted to give us all he knew before going away, and
to put it all into our heads at one stroke.
After the grammar, we had a
lesson in writing. That day M. Hamel had new copies for us, written in a
beautiful round hand: France, Alsace, France, Alsace.
They looked like little
flags floating everywhere in the school-room, hung from the rod at the top of
our desks. You ought to have seen how every one set to work, and how quiet it
was! The only sound was the scratching of the pens over the paper. Once some
beetles flew in; but nobody paid any attention to them, not even the littlest
ones, who worked right on tracing their fish-hooks, as if that was French, too.
On the roof the pigeons cooed very low, and I thought to myself:
“Will they make them sing in
German, even the pigeons?”
Whenever I looked up from my
writing I saw M. Hamel sitting motionless in his chair and gazing first at one
thing, then at another, as if he wanted to fix in his mind just how everything
looked in that little school-room. Fancy! For forty years he had been there in
the same place, with his garden outside the window and his class in front of
him, just like that. Only the desks and benches had been worn smooth; the
walnut-trees in the garden were taller, and the hopvine that he had planted
himself twined about the windows to the roof. How it must have broken his heart
to leave it all, poor man; to hear his sister moving about in the room above,
packing their trunks! For they must leave the country next day.
But he had the courage to
hear every lesson to the very last. After the writing, we had a lesson in
history, and then the babies chanted their ba, be bi, bo, bu. Down there at the
back of the room old Hauser had put on his spectacles and, holding his primer
in both hands, spelled the letters with them. You could see that he, too, was
crying; his voice trembled with emotion, and it was so funny to hear him that
we all wanted to laugh and cry. Ah, how well I remember it, that last lesson!
All at once the church-clock
struck twelve. Then the Angelus. At the same moment the trumpets of the
Prussians, returning from drill, sounded under our windows. M. Hamel stood up,
very pale, in his chair. I never saw him look so tall.
“My friends,” said he,
“I—I—” But something choked him. He could not go on.
Then he turned to the
blackboard, took a piece of chalk, and, bearing on with all his might, he wrote
as large as he could:
“Vive La France!”
Then he stopped and leaned
his head against the wall, and, without a word, he made a gesture to us with
his hand:
“School is dismissed—you may
go.”
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