TWO
It was Jean Massieu who gave me the courage to walk away from the abbé Margaron. Not by anything he said, but by his example. For, through him, I was coming to realize that I did not have to be a hearing person manqué. In my new family, loneliness and incomprehension were already slipping away. Massieu, who never spoke, was the head of that family by rank, by seniority (he had joined the abbé Sicard more than a dozen years before I came to the school), and by common consent: he was the first deaf teacher ever and a symbol worldwide of what a deaf man could achieve through education—more than that, a symbol of the power of education to create a new, egalitarian society in the wake of the destruction of the old aristocracy. Princes traveled to see and philosophers to interrogate the deaf scholar who had begun life as a shepherd. In 1805, the pope himself, Pius VII, visited our school and gave Massieu a copy of The Lives of the Popes, from which he was to communicate a selection in sign language—to me! I was twenty then, and trembling before the august father of the Church and his entourage of several hundred. His Holiness, seated on a throne that had been placed on the dais of the assembly hall and specially bedecked for this occasion, opened his book, indicated a page at random, and Massieu began signing the text in the system of manual French developed by the abbé de l’Epée and then the abbé Sicard.1 I wrote the text on the blackboard. The pope questioned Massieu in writing about such matters as the definition of “hell” and he answered (while I transcribed), “Hell is the eternal torment of the wicked, a limitless torrent of fire that God uses to punish those who die offending Him.”2
JEAN MASSIEU
Deaf people had, of course, been educated before Jean Massieu. A noble family has a son deafened by disease. The family hires a private tutor, often a distinguished man of letters, who labors to maintain, perhaps restore, the boy’s deteriorating speech, and to expand his knowledge of literature, history, the sciences. The boy makes admirable progress, a philosopher notes it in his journal, or the tutor publishes it in a book or in letters. The tutor goes on to other endeavors; the boy generally does not, but in any case such a youth could never attain the status of a symbol for deaf people because he is not truly deaf, he belongs to the hearing world.
Massieu was truly deaf. He had five deaf brothers and sisters and was signing by the time he was one year old. But I will let him tell his story in his own words, as he related it in sign language to the Society of Observers of Man in 1800.3 In some ways it is the story of all deaf children everywhere. When he tells of his isolation, I remember my own; his needless fears, his frustrated desires—those were mine, too.
“I was born at Semens,” Massieu told the society, “in the Cadillac district of the canton of Saint-Macaire in the department of the Gironde. My father died in January 1791; my mother is still living. There were six deaf-mutes in our family, three boys and three girls.… Until the age of thirteen years and nine months, I remained at home without ever receiving any education. I was totally unlettered. I expressed my ideas by manual signs or gestures. At that time the signs I used to express my ideas to my family were quite different from the signs of educated deaf-mutes. Strangers did not understand us when we expressed our ideas with signs, but the neighbors did. I saw cattle, horses, donkeys, pigs, dogs, cats, vegetables, houses, fields, grapevines, and after seeing all these things, I remembered them well.
“Before my education, when I was a child, I did not know how to read or write. I wanted to read and write. I often saw boys and girls going to school; I wanted to follow them and I was very envious of them. With tears in my eyes I asked my father for permission to go to school. I took a book and opened it upside-down to show my ignorance; I put it under my arm as if to leave for school, but my father refused to give me this permission, signing that I could never learn anything, for I was a deaf-mute. Then I wept.… In desperation I put my fingers to my ears and impatiently asked my father to unclog them. He answered that there was no remedy. I was disconsolate.
“I left my father’s house and went to school without telling him. I presented myself to the teacher and asked him with gestures to teach me to read and write. He sternly refused and sent me away. This made me cry a great deal but did not discourage me. I often thought about reading and writing. I was twelve at the time. I tried on my own to form the letters of the alphabet with a quill pen.
“When I was a child, my father made me pray morning and evening with gestures: I got on my knees, clasped my hands, and moved my lips, imitating speaking people when they prayed to God. Today I know there is a God, the creator of heaven and earth. But as a child I worshiped the sky, not God. I did not see God, I saw the sky.…
“Children my own age would not play with me; they looked down on me; I was like a dog. I passed the time alone, playing with a top or a mallet and ball, or walking on stilts. I did know how to count before my education; my fingers had taught me. I did not know numbers; I counted on my fingers, and when the count went beyond ten I made notches on a stick.
“When I was a child my parents sometimes had me watch over their flock of sheep, and sometimes people happening by took pity and gave me a little money. One day a passerby took a liking to me and invited me to his house to eat and drink. Later when he went to Bordeaux, he spoke about me to Abbé Sicard, who agreed to take charge of my education. This man wrote to my father, who showed me the letter, but I couldn’t read it. My relatives and neighbors told me its contents: they informed me that I would be going to Bordeaux; they thought the reason was to learn to be a cooper. My father told me the reason was to learn to read and write. I made my way with him to the city. On our arrival I found the houses very beautiful. We went to visit the abbé Sicard, whom I found extremely thin.*
“I began my education tracing the letters of the alphabet with my fingers. Within several days I could write a few words. In a space of three months I knew how to write many words; in six months, I knew how to write some sentences. In one year’s time I wrote fairly well. In a year and some months I wrote even better and gave good answers to questions. I had been with Abbé Sicard three and a half years when I left with him for Paris. In four years I became like people who hear and speak.”4
Massieu addressed the society again, a week after presenting his autobiography. This time he answered questions from the floor while Sicard served as interpreter, and the secretary recorded the exchanges.
—Before your education began, what did you make of people who moved their lips in each other’s presence?
—I thought they were expressing ideas.
—Why did you think that?
—Because I remembered that someone had spoken to my father about me and that he had threatened to punish me.
—So you thought that lip movements were a way to communicate ideas?
—Yes.
—Why didn’t you move your lips to communicate your thoughts?
—Because I hadn’t looked enough at the lips of people speaking and I was told that the noises I made were disagreeable. Since I had been told that my infirmity was in my ears, I took some brandy and poured it into my ears and stopped them up with cotton.
—Did you know what hearing was?
—Yes.
—How did you learn that?
—One of my hearing relatives who lived in our house had told me that she “saw with her ears” someone whom she could not see with her eyes when he came to see my father. Hearing people “see with their ears” when someone is walking about at night. Nightwalkers have a gait that is different for different people and hearing people can tell whose step it is and this identifies them.
—What were you thinking about while your father made you remain on your knees?
—About the sky.
—What were you trying to accomplish by praying to the sky?
—To make the night come down to earth so the plants I had planted would grow and so the sick would be restored to health.
—Were your prayers in ideas, words, feelings?
—It was my heart that prayed. I did not yet understand words or their meaning.
—What did you feel in your heart?
—Joy, when I found the plants and fruits growing; grief, when I saw them damaged by the hail and when my sick relatives remained sick.
With these words Massieu made many signs expressing anger. It seems that once, when his mother was ill, he used to go out every evening and pray to a particular star, which he had selected for its beauty, entreating it to bring about her recovery. Finding that she became worse, however, he was enraged and threw stones at the star.
—Were you cursing the sky?
—Yes.
—Why?
—Because I thought that I could not get at it to give it a thrashing, to kill it for causing all those disasters and for not healing my sick relatives.
—Weren’t you afraid of provoking it and of being punished?
—I didn’t then know my good teacher Sicard and I didn’t know that it was merely the sky. It was only after a year of education that I was afraid of being punished by it.
—Did you imagine that this sky had a shape or form?
—My father had shown me a large statue in the church near our home. It represented an old man with a long beard and in his hand he held a globe. I thought he lived above the sun.
—Did you know who had made the cow or the horse or other animals?
—No, but I was very curious to see a birth. I often went and hid in a ditch to see the sky descend to earth to make things grow. I wanted very much to see it.
—What did you think when Abbé Sicard first had you trace words with the letters of the alphabet?
—I thought that words were images of the objects I saw around me. I memorized words with great enthusiasm. When I read the word “God” and had written it in chalk on the blackboard, I thought that God caused death and I was afraid of death.
Many uneducated deaf youths frame for themselves fanciful explanations of such striking events as illness and death, birth, and growth, the changing of the seasons; thus, the wind is blown from a great bellows, the rain pours down through small holes in the sky, snow is ground out like flour from a celestial mill, thunder and lightning are the discharges of cannon, the stars are candles lighted every evening.5 Jean Massieu, however, retained such fancies and apprehensions after he became an adult. He was not stupid, he was unsophisticated; it is a great error to confuse the two, and never more so than with the deaf. In fact, Massieu was in many ways a genius. Jean-Marc Itard, the physician who, in 1800, brought the Wild Boy of Aveyron to our school to begin his education, wrote that Massieu was “a deep thinker and a keen observer with a prodigious memory, full of insights with flashes of brilliance.”6 His answers to questions were sometimes incorrect grammatically, for he did not slavishly observe the rules of French, but they were always in conformity with sound logic. When it happened that he did not know a word, Massieu invented one by following the principles of analogy, and his slight errors paled before the originality of his thoughts, the coloring of his fancies, the justness of his comparisons, and the brilliance of his metaphors. His answers to the deepest questions took the form of short artful blends of description and definition, given without the least hesitation. They seemed to flow spontaneously. Thus Sicard said of Massieu, “It was enough to strike the stone with the steel, and immediately the spark would issue.”
A member of the British Parliament asked him: “What is hope?”
—Hope is the blossom of happiness.
—What is time?
—A line that has two ends, a path that begins in the cradle and ends in the tomb.
“What is intelligence?” Sicard asked him at a public demonstration.
“It is the power of the mind to move in the straight line of truth,” help wrote on the board, “to distinguish the right from the wrong, the necessary from the superfluous, to see clearly and precisely. It is the force, courage, and vigor of the mind.”
And all this was in manual or written French, Massieu’s second language. In his primary language, the French Sign Language in use by the deaf community, Massieu was a fluent signer with animated expression and great vivacity.
At the same time, this man, whose only homes had been a farm and an institution, whose only teachers had been his parents and an eccentric abbé, was in many ways a child. He had a childish passion for watches, as I mentioned, and for seals and gilded keys. Likewise, he bought books throughout Paris, carried them in his pockets, under his arms and in his hands, and presented them for inspection at the slightest opportunity. He bought elaborate outfits at auctions and wore them to school, to the vast amusement of the pupils. I confess I was not above mocking him on occasion. Since he was guileless, Massieu consulted us pupils in matters of taste, shared his anxieties with us, even, I believe, feared to displease us. We found these unworldly ways laughable, but also lovable.7
“Massieu lived alone,” wrote Itard, “without desire or ambition.” But Massieu did have one burning desire, an overwhelming ambition, that preempted all other concerns and explains in part his naïveté: to promote the education of the deaf. Most of what we know about Jean Massieu can be summed up by these simple, noble words: he was a teacher.
He was, first, Sicard’s teacher. He taught him the elements of sign language, as Sicard freely acknowledged. And he taught Sicard respect for the deaf. In his earliest writings, the abbé described the deaf man as “a being who is a total nullity in society, a living automaton…. Before we lift the shroud that envelops his mind, he does not even have primitive animal instincts.”8 But after some years of collaborating with Massieu, Sicard wrote: “The deaf man is not all that destitute…. He brings a communicative spirit to his teacher’s lessons which … lights up his face … and gives his gestures all the shapes they require to designate objects…. Direct from his home and without any lessons he is not less eloquent than a hearing child.”9
Massieu was my teacher as well as Sicard’s, and later he was the teacher of Thomas Gallaudet, who came from America to learn how to educate the deaf. Massieu was a teacher in the larger sense as well; he seized every opportunity to campaign for the education of the deaf. He appeared with Sicard at the Ecole Normale* and demonstrated Sicard’s method by using it to teach a deaf pupil to write the names of a few objects sketched on the board.10 He was the star attraction at Sicard’s thrice-weekly demonstration classes and monthly public exercises, which helped to protect the school through the tumultuous period of the Revolution and inspired other European nations to found similar schools. Indeed, I suspect the government would not have taken the school under its protection were it not for Massieu. Sicard was appointed director in 1790 largely on the strength of Massieu’s performance, and when the Committee on Mendicancy received Sicard’s plea for government funding, its favorable recommendation to the Legislative Assembly the following year cited Massieu’s accomplishments: “He understands all our ideas and can express all his own. He knows all the intricacies of grammar and even of metaphysics perfectly. He is thoroughly familiar with the rules of mathematics, celestial mechanics, and geography. He has a knowledge of religion from the beginning of the world to the era of the death of the founder of that religion. He knows the principles of the Constitution and his mind has grasped them with all the more eagerness as it was never corrupted by any of our old beliefs.”11
Massieu was a loyal friend and only remembered friends’ kindnesses. He would brush off taunts, though he could be brusque when stung.12 His loyalty to Sicard was deep and unwavering: “We are two bars forged together,” Massieu wrote of their friendship. For thirty years he regularly gave the better part of his salary to Sicard for safekeeping and when Sicard lost it all to his creditors, Massieu forgave him.
Massieu’s loyalty to Sicard and to the education of the deaf—the two were inextricable then—led him repeatedly to rescue Sicard from trouble with the political authorities; this young deaf man had access to very high places, such was his renown. Once he saved Sicard’s life; both the abbé and Massieu often told the story, which took place five years before I came to the school, just as the monarchy was overthrown in France.
Two weeks after Louis XVI was suspended from office, sixty armed citizens stormed into the Celestine cloister, where the Institution for Deaf-Mutes was temporarily lodged, and seized Sicard as he was preparing his lessons. The Revolutionary Commune had ordered his arrest, along with that of many other priests who had failed to take the oath of civil allegiance, which was required by the legislature but prohibited by the pope—both on pain of dismissal from office.13 Thus began Sicard’s flirtation with death, in which he would be drawn into the bloody vortex of the September Massacre.*
Led at saber point through the streets to the city hall, the abbé was arraigned before the Executive Council, stripped of personal effects, including his breviary, which was minutely searched for counterrevolutionary notes, and locked up in the basement with a crowd of people from all social classes.14 The following morning Massieu arrived and gave his teacher a copy of the petition he was going to present to the Legislative Assembly:
“The deaf-mute pupils of the abbé Sicard have come here to implore the return of their father, their friend, and their teacher who is in prison; he has wronged no one, he has aided many, he has taught us to love the Revolution and the sacred principles of liberty and equality, he loves all men, good and evil.” (Sicard later had this petition published, but saw fit to infantilize the language, consistent with his early conception of deaf people: “… He has killed no one; he has stolen nothing; he is not a bad citizen…. Without him we would be animals …” and so on.)15
The Assembly was greatly moved when its secretary read Massieu’s appeal, and ordered the minister of the interior to show cause for Sicard’s arrest. Directly, Massieu went to visit Sicard in prison. “Then I received the first visit of this precious pupil whom I named my heir,” Sicard wrote. “What a meeting! Massieu in the arms of his father, his teacher, his friend … Massieu … his soul afire, joined to mine, our two hearts beating against each other. This miserable youth had gone without food and sleep every day that his teacher was endangered…. What signs his hands let fly! … What a scene the other prisoners witnessed! Who could have not been touched by it?”16
But days passed while the Assembly’s order was ignored. The prosecutor of the Revolutionary Commune arrived and announced that the Assembly had ordered the deportation of all priests who had refused the oath of civil allegiance. He took their names, including Sicard’s, who added the title, “instructor of deaf-mutes.” Presently, the clergy were herded off as promised, but Sicard was left behind. A day later two dozen more prisoners arrived, and their visitors reported that the priests had been sent not into exile but to the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to await execution.
On Sunday, September 2, the news came that Verdun was about to surrender to the Prussians, who were marching toward Paris with the aim of restoring the monarchy to power.* Tocsin and cannon sounded the alarm throughout the capital. Volunteers massed to leave for the front and rumors circulated that their departure was to be the signal for prisoners to stage an uprising. In the midst of the general agitation and uncertainty, soldiers entered the prison to lead Sicard and the others to the abbey of Saint-Germain.
The prisoners naturally pleaded for carriages to protect them from the mobs en route, and Sicard and five others were placed in the first. Word spread that the procession winding over the Pont Neuf and up the rue Dauphine contained traitors and foreign agents. The soldiers maliciously kept the doors of the carriages open, and by the time they reached the Buci Crossing, Sicard and all of his companions were bloody from saber strokes. The courtyard of the abbey overflowed with an armed mob, which surrounded the carriages on their arrival. One of Sicard’s group leaped out and his throat was cut; a second tried to slip out and escape in the tumult; the cutthroats fell on him and more blood flowed. A third was seized and swallowed up by the mob as the carriage approached the main door. The fourth was struck by a sword as he dashed into the building. Somehow Sicard, cowering in the back of the carriage, was overlooked, and the crowd turned its wrath on the second wagon.
Sicard slipped into a room in the abbey where an administrative committee was in session and begged for their protection. Soon there was pounding on the door; voices demanding the prisoner echoed through the room. Sicard gave his watch to one of the commissioners with instructions to give it to the first deaf-mute who inquired after him—that would be Massieu, who treasured watches—and knelt to commend his soul to God. The doors opened and the crowd flooded in: “There’s the bastard we’re after!” Several men lunged for Sicard, daggers drawn. Then suddenly one of the mob strode in front of him, turned to the assassins, and bared his chest: “Here is the breast you must penetrate first,” he cried, “to reach the father of the deaf.” It was a watchmaker from the rue des Petits-Augustins, named Monnot. There was a moment’s hesitation. Sicard climbed onto a windowsill and addressed the crowd milling below in the courtyard: “My friends, I am innocent. Will you have me put to death without hearing me?” “You must die like the others!” was the reply. “Listen to who I am and what I do and then decide my fate! I instruct those who are born deaf and mute. Since there are many more of these unfortunate children among the poor than the rich, I belong more to you than to the rich.” Now a voice cried, “We must spare Sicard. He is too useful to kill. He hasn’t the time to be a conspirator.”
“Spare Sicard! Spare Sicard,” chanted the crowd and the cutthroats waiting behind him rushed forward and embraced him, offering to lead him home in triumph.
Sicard, to the astonishment of all, refused. He thanked the gathering but preferred to remain where he was until released officially. The crowd returned to the slaughter in the courtyard. Bodies were everywhere and the cobblestones were red with blood. The main prison had been emptied and its occupants were being stuck like pigs. As dusk fell, lamps were set out so the public could bear witness.
The concierge offered Sicard hospitality but he preferred a closet adjacent to the committee room, where he spent the night listening to the pleas and death cries of the victims in the courtyard outside and the applause of the witnesses. By dawn more than a thousand corpses filled the prison yards of Paris; about a fourth of these were priests.
In the morning Sicard received word that he would be executed at four o’clock. He sent word to a deputy of the Legislative Assembly, imploring him to come quickly and accompany him from the abbey directly to the Assembly. The Assembly was no longer in session, but a secretary in the hall carried the message to the deputy, who approached the president, who went before the Committee on Public Instruction, which ordered the Commune to release Sicard. The Commune received the message at six o’clock, two hours past the deadline, but a downpour had delayed Sicard’s execution. At seven o’clock, a municipal officer, wearing the tricolor to fend off the waiting crowd of public executioners, led Sicard from the abbey.
Accompanied by the watchmaker Monnot, Sicard went at once to the Legislative Assembly. “All hearts awaited me there,” he later wrote, “and general applause welcomed me. All the deputies wished to embrace me; tears flowed from all eyes when, inspired only by the finest sentiments, I gave a speech to thank my liberators.”17
Within hours, Massieu was in his arms again, weak from hunger and sleeplessness, but reunited with his benefactor. It was September 4, ten days after Sicard’s arrest. Once freed, Sicard thought it prudent not to resume office immediately and he took refuge in the home of another watchmaker, a M. Lacombe, who, at great personal risk, had been searching for the imprisoned abbé everywhere. Has the coincidence struck you? One watchmaker shields Sicard from the assassin’s dagger, another hides him. I have since wondered if their actions were not prompted by affection for Massieu; perhaps my friend’s passion for watches was not so childish after all.18
A year later Sicard was again denounced, imprisoned briefly, and released.19 Then, in the summer of 1797, just before I arrived at the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes, the Directory launched a campaign against conservatives and Catholics.20 Sicard, who had not been discreet about his sympathies for the deposed monarchy and who was editor of a politico-religious newspaper, the Religious Annals, which supported the authority of the pope over the national government when these conflicted, was banished to Guiana. As I have told, he fled instead into hiding in the outskirts of Paris.21
The months passed. The abbé used the time to write two books: one a general grammar,22 the other a detailed account of how he had trained Massieu;23 this was the second book ever to explain how to educate the deaf, preceded only by the treatise on the subject by Sicard’s mentor, the abbé de l’Epée,24 and it was to have a great influence. Fruitless efforts by friends to secure his release from exile led Sicard to publish a disclaimer in a revolutionary newspaper, affirming in effect that he believed what circumstances required him to believe and that he had not—this was a lie—written the articles for which he was banished.25 “For me,” he wrote, “all authority exercised by the powers that be is by that very fact legitimate. Thus, by the same faith that I was a royalist [I am now], since the proclamation of the Republic, a zealous republican.”
In the end, however, it was Massieu who once again rescued his beloved teacher—Massieu and the playwright Jean Nicolas Bouilly.26 Massieu’s first efforts to secure Sicard’s release from banishment failed. He wrote a petition and sent it to several authorities but to no effect. He went to the home of General Bonaparte, victorious commander of the French forces in Italy, with a petition in hand; he was not admitted, though a servant came to the school some days later to collect the document.27 Meanwhile, however, Bouilly had written a drama called The Abbé de l’Epée in the hope of drawing attention to Sicard’s plight.28 The play was presented in December of 1799 at the National Theater,29 a month after the general succeeded in a coup d’état30 and suppressed the Directory.31 Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine attended the second performance.32 During the fifth act,33when the abbé de l’Epée says, “The other pupils that I left in Paris suffer greatly from my absence,” several men of letters, friends of Sicard’s, who were seated in the gallery facing Bonaparte’s box,34 rose and shouted, “We want Sicard released,” or words to that effect. Many in the audience joined the chant: “Release Sicard, release Sicard.” Napoleon appeared to take notice of the outburst.
Then Massieu conceived another plan to reinstate Sicard: a friendly legislator who knew Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, would invite Joseph to dinner and Massieu and Sicard would visit afterward and appeal for his intervention with the first consul. It came to pass as hoped. Massieu pleaded for Sicard’s reappointment, Joseph was moved by Massieu’s petition and agreed to intervene, Massieu put an arm around each of these two great men (as he recounted), and the three of them cried together.35 Less than a month later Napoleon ordered Sicard returned to the directorship of the National Institution after twenty-eight months in retreat.36
Sicard arranged for his return to take place with great pomp.37 At eleven in the morning we were all gathered in the assembly hall, boys and girls alike, seated on benches facing the dais. I was somewhat impatient—this was to be my first glimpse of the famous Abbé Sicard—but Massieu seemed unable to wait even a second longer. He strode back and forth through the spectators’ gallery, his head bowed, his eyes staring, his breathing shallow. The gallery was jammed: with men of letters, including the author of The Abbé de l’Epée, with beautiful women evidently from high society, and with the public at large. Suddenly Sicard appeared, moving briskly down the center aisle, the front of his black redingote splashed with decorations, the back billowing behind him. He had on black stockings and black shoes with buckles. He was much less grand than I had expected, rather short and fat, and he carried himself somewhat awkwardly, with his head tilted forward and to one side. His gray wig was long, flowing, and parted in the middle, which only seemed to accentuate a rather square face seated on a short neck. His large dark eyes and ample nose bespoke his Mediterranean origins, and deep lines were etched from his nose to the corners of a full mouth over a receding chin. He held his arms out in front of him when he walked, like a priest in a pulpit.38 Massieu virtually leaped into them and they embraced warmly. Then he led Sicard by the hand into the middle of the gallery, where we rushed to join him. Some kissed his hands and knees; many were reduced to tears. As Massieu had arranged, I went to the blackboard and wrote an homage to Napoleon; another student told of our travails without our “father.” Money for the school had stopped coming, meat had been dropped completely from our menu, and the rooms, never well heated, were now really quite cold. The government, as devoutly anticlerical as ever, had ordered an end to religious exercises and we were not even supposed to pray or make the sign of the cross.39 Another student put a flowered crown on Sicard’s head while Massieu wrote out a lesson on the blackboard. To express thanks to Bouilly, the students made a bust of the abbé de l’Epée and later delivered it to the playwright’s home.40 He afterward told us that when he described to Napoleon the moving return of Sicard to our institution, the first consul thanked him for his play, since it gave him the occasion to return Sicard to his pupils.41 That was the first and last kindness the emperor ever extended to Sicard. Although the abbé had in common with his famous student a certain childlike naïveté, the calling of a teacher, and a strong claim on the love of humanitarians, he also had three failings, utterly alien to Massieu, that angered Napoleon: hypocrisy, guile, and vanity. But if Massieu knew of these flaws in his teacher, he was too loyal ever to speak of them in the half century of our friendship, which only death could dissolve.
*The corpulent abbé Sicard was in the audience.
*National Teacher Training College.
*September 2-7, 1792.
*The Prussian army was turned back at Valmy, in Champagne Province.