An 1877 Schoolboy Complains, and Gets the Good Old Days

In 1877 Marcel Charlot, a pupil at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, wrote a comic poem called “Un rêve au dortoir”, A Dream in the Dormitory. It is the oldest complaint about boarding school I have read, and it has the structure of every complaint my children have ever made, except that it rhymes and ends worse for the complainant.

It is a summer evening. The light is still gold and the whole dormitory has been put to bed regardless. Every other boy is snoring. Our hero is not. He has troubles without number, chief among them the dormitory itself, down whose gloomy corridor, in dreams, the shadow of a punishment assignment is always prowling. He decides he is a plough horse in a heavy collar.

So he lodges a complaint against the century. This age, he says, is so humane and charitable, so quick to rescue the wretched, that it might spare a thought for the schoolboy. Some people miss a happier age out loud. If he had lived then, he would not be stuck in this cage, mangling Greek against his will.

The dream, which has been waiting for its cue, takes him at his word.

He wakes in the good old days, and the good old days have a timetable.

The schoolroom is dark, lit by one oil lamp, with a flagstone floor he finds with his foot. The master has a honeyed voice and sets the question for the day: when a beast of burden is led to the fair, who leads it, the rope or the man? The plough horse laughs.

Then a pupil recites a mash of Greek and Latin so dreadful that the boy’s own Greek suddenly sounds fluent. He is asked to recite it better. He cannot. The master offers “twenty good strokes of the strap” to teach him the laws of the syllogism. Logic, delivered by leather. He complains to the headmaster, who does not listen.

Lunch is a spoiled egg and a stew described as rabbit, which the French text calls lapin de gouttière, gutter rabbit, a cat travelling under a rabbit’s good name. The wine has turned to vinegar and been watered, fortunately.

The bed is a broken pallet that is, he notes in horror, inhabited. Happy are travellers who sleep in tents, he thinks. He started the evening asking a whole century for better treatment, and ended it ready to swap with anyone in a tent.

Then a drum sounds. He wakes in his own century, in his own dormitory, flooded with light.

I read the poem to the middle one, who had complained the night before that her bedroom was “basically a prison”. She listened to the whole thing, including the cat.

Then she said that at least they had wine. I am drafting a complaint against the century.