The pseudonymous ‘Michael Blowhard’ of 2Blowhards was recommending Maupassant the week before last. Inspired by his enthusiasm, I checked out a collection of short stories, one of which turned out to be very pertinent to (of all things) Latin teaching methods. Here is the relevant passage of “This Business of Latin”, as translated by David Coward in the Oxford World’s Classics volume Guy de Maupassant: Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories:

For ten years, Robineau’s Academy had obtained much better examination-results than the town’s grammar school and all the secondary schools in the area, and its continuing success was generally attributed to one lowly assistant master, Monsieur Piquedent, or rather Old Piquedent.

[I pass over the cruel description of Piquedent and his career.]

One day he got the idea of making all the pupils in his class give their answers entirely in Latin. He persisted with this notion until they could keep up a conversation with him as easily as they could in their own tongue.

He listened to them as the conductor of an orchestra listens to musicians rehearsing, and he was forever banging his desk with his ruler, saying:

‘Lefrère, Lefrère, you are perpetrating a howler! Can’t you remember the rule . . . ?’

‘Plantel, that turn of phrase is irretrievably French, not Latin. You must get the feel of the language. Pay attention, listen to me . . .’

At the end of one school year, pupils of Robineau’s Academy walked off with all the prizes for prose composition, unseen translation and Latin diction.

The following session, the headmaster, a small man as sly as the grinning, grotesque monkey he so closely resembled, inserted the following into the prospectus and advertising-matter and also had it painted over the door of the Academy:

Specialization in Latin Studies.
Five First Prizes Awarded in all Five Classes in the Academy.
Two Distinctions in Public Examinations open to all
Grammar and Secondary Schools in France.

For ten years, Robineau’s Academy continued to carry all before it.

Thanks to the pseudonymous ‘J. Cassian’ of February 30th (scroll down to the 19th), I find that the story is on-line in French and (rather clunky) English at this impressively full Maupassant site. Go to the alphabetic list of titles and scroll down to Q: the French title is “La Question du Latin”. Here’s the relevant portion of the French text, for those too lazy to follow the link:

Depuis dix ans, l’institution Robineau battait, à tous les concours, le lycée impérial de la ville et tous les collèges des sous-préfectures, et ses succès constants étaient dus, disait-on, à un pion, un simple pion, M. Piquedent, ou plutôt le père Piquedent.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Un jour, l’idée lui vint de forcer tous les élèves de son étude à ne lui répondre qu’en latin ; et il persista dans cette résolution, jusqu’au moment où ils furent capables de soutenir avec lui une conversation entière comme ils l’eussent fait dans leur langue maternelle.

Il les écoutait ainsi qu’un chef d’orchestre écoute répéter ses musiciens, et à tout moment frappant son pupitre de sa règle :

“Monsieur Lefrère, monsieur Lefrère, vous faites un solécisme! Vous ne vous rappelez donc pas la règle ? . . .”

“Monsieur Plantel, votre tournure de phrase est toute française et nullement latine. Il faut comprendre le génie d’une langue. Tenez, écoutez-moi . . .”

Or il arriva que les élèves de l’institution Robineau emportèrent, en fin d’année, tous les prix de thème, version et discours latins.

L’an suivant, le patron, un petit homme rusé comme un singe dont il avait d’ailleurs le physique grimaçant et grotesque, fit imprimer sur ses programmes, sur ses réclames et peindre sur la porte de son institution :

“Spécialités d’études latines. — Cinq premiers prix remportés dans les cinq classes du lycée.

“Deux prix d’honneur au Concours général avec tous les lycées et collèges de France.”

Pendant dix ans l’institution Robineau triompha de la même façon.

A few random comments:

1. The French word translated “assistant master” is ‘pion’, which also means ‘pawn’ in chess. Whether it is related to English (or rather Spanish) ‘peon’ I do not know.
2. ‘Piquedent’ must mean ‘Toothpick’ or ‘Picktooth’, so the students of course call him ‘Piquenez’. Do I have to translate that?
3. Piquedent’s teaching career comes to a sudden and rather surprising end, but whether it is a bad end or not is difficult to judge. The simian headmaster no doubt thought so.
4. The headmaster arranges special lessons for the narrator, charging him five francs an hour, of which Piquedent receives only two.
5. Most important, I want to know whether the teacher’s method was something Maupassant invented, or found in real life.

In 1937, a Latin teacher named L. E. Eyres published his “Ludus Elegiacus” in Greece & Rome (pages 56-57 and 155). It is a set of twenty-five epigrams in elegiac couplets, the first five of four lines each, the rest single couplets. As the editor’s introduction states, it was designed “to teach a School Certificate class to recognize the difference in meaning between words of similar appearance, and to use scansion as an aid to translation”. Because of copyright laws, I can’t reproduce the whole thing, but here are a few samples:

6. The street-singer and his dog.

Cane, canet canis hic: solus cantare recusat:
   Deest mihi vox: tu, sis, cum cane, cane, cane.

9. Ship’s rations.

Navigat ad Cares coniunx meus: esurit ergo:
   Quod tam cara caro, carne carina caret.

17. The scrounger.

Anulus annosae fuerat; mihi saepe precato
   Annuit: insipiens est anus, anne sapit?

Of course, this last omits one of the Latin words beginning with an- as inappropriate for schoolboys. No such inhibition was felt by Colin Haycroft of Duckworth & Co. in a letter published in the (London) Spectator on July 20, 1985:

Sir: As the subject of ‘mooning’ at Greenham Common has raised its ugly head (?) in your columns (Home life, 13 July), may I submit to you an epigram (veiled in the decent obscurity of a learned language) inspired by a recent incident that occasioned a lady’s protest?

Terga tuens duri versa ad se militis olim,
   ‘ei mihi, nil gratum est’ dixerat ‘anus’ anus.

Some purely verbal jokes work equally well in many languages. Here is a paragraph of Chekhov’s one-page squib, “From a Retired Teacher’s Notebook”:

The words ‘proposition’ and ‘conjunction’ make schoolgirls modestly lower their eyes and blush, but the terms ‘organic’ and ‘copulative’ enable schoolboys to face the future hopefully.

(The Oxford Chekhov, tr. Ronald Hingley, Volume VI, Stories, 1892-1893, p. 260)

Here is the next paragraph, the only other one (of six) that struck me as particularly interesting:

As the vocative case and certain rare letters of the Russian alphabet are practically obsolete, teachers of Russian should in all fairness have their salaries reduced, inasmuch as this decline in cases and letters has reduced their work load.

Now you don’t have to read the whole story.

I wonder if any Latin teachers in the Middle Ages thought to ask for a pay raise when W and J and the distinction between U and V were added to the original 23-letter Latin alphabet to make the modern English set of 26 — not that that all happened at once. Actually, the development of the English alphabet was a bit more complicated than simple accretion, since the two th’s, eth (ð) and thorn (þ), were added at some point and later subtracted, though they survive in Icelandic.