make such nonsense of a word that means noble family, of patrician
rank?"

"She would say that you were an ass!" said I in a muttered tone.

"Master Poet, you will stay in for a week," replied the master, who
unfortunately overheard me.

Lambert simply repeated, looking at me with inexpressible affection,
"_Vir nobilis_!"

Madame de Stael was, in fact, partly the cause of Lambert's troubles.
On every pretext masters and pupils threw the name in his teeth,
either in irony or in reproof.

Louis lost no time in getting himself "kept in" to share my
imprisonment. Freer thus than in any other circumstances, we could
talk the whole day long in the silence of the dormitories, where each
boy had a cubicle six feet square, the partitions consisting at the
top of open bars. The doors, fitted with gratings, were locked at
night and opened in the morning under the eye of the Father whose duty
it was to superintend our rising and going to bed. The creak of these
gates, which the college servants unlocked with remarkable expedition,
was a sound peculiar to that college. These little cells were our
prison, and boys were sometimes shut up there for a month at a time.
The boys in these coops were under the stern eye of the prefect, a
sort of censor who stole up at certain hours, or at unexpected
moments, with a silent step, to hear if we were talking instead of
writing our impositions. But a few walnut shells dropped on the
stairs, or the sharpness of our hearing, almost always enabled us to