Page:Discipline in school and cloister (1902).djvu/42

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memory of blows received. Marmontel, a student of philosophy, escaped a flogging only by causing the whole college to revolt. La Reveillère-Lepeaux, a day-boarder at a priest's, attributed his deformity to the blows he was always getting on his back. Lastly, G. de Pixérécourt the dramatist, even goes so far as to say that his liability to gout was contracted in early youth by his having to kneel on the threshold of the school to receive the floggings he was always getting.

At Troyes College, a few years before the Revolution, the teacher of rhetoric wanted to cane one of his pupils; the others were indignant and cried out—a student of rhetoric, eighteen years old, to be punished like a child! One voice was raised which thundered out above all the rest. This young orator, whose first triumph this was, was no other than Danton. The student whose part he had taken was Paré; the Minister of Justice of 1792 made him Home Secretary in 1793. College friendships are useful sometimes.

There are two countries, neighbours of ours, where the rod still has a place of honour—we mean England and Germany. In