repeated the lunch menu. Only on feast days did the monotonous fare
vary: one Epiphany Napoleon noted down that the boys had been served
chicken, cauliflower, beetroot salad, cake, chestnuts and hot dessert.
There was a strict dress code. Pupils wore a blue coat with red facings
and white metal buttons; the waistcoat was blue faced with white; the
breeches were blue or black and an overcoat was allowed in winter. No
servants were permitted. Linen was changed twice a week, but only one
rug was permitted on the bed, except in cases of illness. Up to the age of
twelve the boys had to have their hair cut short but after that a pigtail was
to be worn; powder could be worn only on Sundays and saints' days. The
regime was austere in other ways. Boys were not allowed to visit home
except in the case of death or severe illness of a parent, parental visits
were discouraged, and there were no real holidays. During the short
annual break between zr A�gust and 8 September classes were cancelled
and the boys taken on long walks, though the Champagne countryside
hardly inspired Romantic feelings: Brienne was situated in flat, agricul
tural and often flooded or waterlogged terrain, where the monotony was
broken only by wretched, poverty-stricken villages, dilapidated cottages,
smoking bothies and thatched hovels.
The teachers at the school were of poor calibre and sometimes
downright incompetent. The Berton brothers, who had started life in the
Army and now acted as Principal and Vice-Principal, did not run a tight
ship and were even cavalier about religion: the younger Berton brother,
Jean-Baptiste, used to race through Mass in nine or ten minutes. Vulgar
yet pretentious, tough yet incompetent, cynical, worldly and faineant, the
Berton brothers, as their name suggests, would have been better running
a circus than a military school. Official inspections of the school in 1785
and 1787 found laziness and carelessness in both staff and students, and
the r787 report recorded outright indiscipline. The Bertons' career was
hardly a glittering success. Napoleon, in one of those flashes of genuine
generosity his critics never acknowledge, rescued Louis Berton, the
Principal, from poverty in later years and gave him a sinecure in
educational administration, but the man died insane. The brother proved
that his record-breaking time for saying Mass was no fluke by getting
himself released from his vows after the Revolution.
The approach to teaching was as pragmatic as the brothers' general
attitude. Latin was studied for moral example, not so as to provide
models for rhetoric; the elements of logic were instilled by detaching
them from their metaphysical and Aristotelian roots; German was taught
because it might be useful in a future war; history, geography and
mathematics for their use in topography and fortification, and so on.
marcin
(Marcin)
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