Ancillia

In French class, Professor Wallace began his lecture with a somber tone, and how he began is always how you knew to prepare. On days when he opened with a bright smile and clever welcome, a bit tipsy, you knew to ease back in your seat and know that your mistakes would be supportive opportunities to learn. On darker days, his frown lines deep and fixed, his hair weighed down by a morning stealing whiskey from his office desk, you knew to brace and that your mistakes would be sterner opportunities to learn better. Today, he was even heavier in his drink, and began reading from Hugo, and although I cannot quite be sure, I believe he was reading Demain des l'aube, a poem he wrote upon his beloved daughter Leopoldine's death at 19, by drowning, joined by her young husband, who died trying to save her. Hugo was despondent and entered a dark period. He began working on Les Miserables in 1946, three years later. 

Today, Professor Wallace was equally disconsolate, though we weren't sure why. He had made one of the girls cry after one of those sterner lessons the class before, upon which he was immediately repentant, but as much as your professors teach you about the world, he taught us nothing of his. Was he married? Divorced? Did he have children or grandchildren? He was so unlike Professor Robertson, who so frequently invited students to his house for wine and music and introduced us to his Spanish speaking wife and flirted with the girls. 

Professor Wallace finished the poem and wept, openly. He had told us that French poetry of the Romantic period was a call for independence from the strict rules of neoclassicism and an invitation to inspire change and sentiment and imagination, reminisce on childhood and recall the beauty of nature. But mostly, it left me sad.

Later in the lecture, he mentioned a term unfamiliar to me, which at the time I wrote down as compraccios, thinking it perhaps borrowed from Italian. He described another Hugo work, whose name I did not jot down, that discussed the plight of these children, purposely mutilated in order to be used as sideshow revenue. It wasn't until much later that looked up the correct term, comprachicos, and that it was from the novel, L'Homme qui Rit, which much, much later, would serve as the inspiration for the DC Comics character, the Joker. 

Later that year, I mentioned to Professor Wallace I would be leaving for a study abroad trip in Romania. Instead of chiding me for not going to France, he was supportive. Romanian is, as the name implies, a romance language country, after all, with a large number of Francophiles, the capital bearing the sobriquet Micul Paris (Paris of the East), with its very own Arcul de Triumf. I promised him I would practice as much as possible, and indeed, for the first few months while I learned the local language, most of my conversations were in French. 

One day as we were walking through the streets of Sibiu, my host parent noted the number of beggars along the street. I saw what looked like a fairly young boy sitting on the cobblestone sidewalk by a cafe, who lifted himself off the ground by his arms and began to approach us. His knees were bent completely backward, much like a woman by the name of Ella Harper, known as Camel Girl, who was herself a part of a traveling circus in the late 1880s. Hers was an extreme congenital condition know as genu recurvatum, but according to my host, the boy in front of us was a victim of mutilation, as a means of earning more charity through pity. I did pity him. I told my host that I had just learned a word for this practice, but at the time could not remember it from my classroom notes.