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GENERAL |
| good time and would not
return too early in the evening.
While they were out, the upperclassmen transformed the underclassmen's rooms into mortuary chapels, with all kinds of black draperies and flaming candles. In the center of the room the bed of the student had become his bier. After being invited to contemplate the demise of their ancient selves, the neophytes were led into the lecture hall, transformed into the tribunal of the Last Judgment, the student body President presiding. There, each was put in front of a large book (I shudder to recall that it was always the Complutensian Polyglot, an original copy printed by Plantin, chosen simply because it was the largest book in the library) and invited first to read the Latin text and to answer facetious questions about himself and his intentions in the ministry. After a resounding condemnation by the Judge, the student was led into the dining room, where we offered a "feast" of Sabi cookies in honor of our new colleagues. Putting his room back in order was, of course, the student's own responsibility. "Chapels," as such transformations of a student's room were called, were also organized for other occasions. Our colleague Georges Richard-Mollard, bragged to us a great deal during his senior year about his fiancée. One afternoon, she was to arrive by rail from Grenoble for a visit, so Georges had put his always horribly messy room into perfect order, so as to make a good impression. He had even polished his working table with shoe polish. When he and she returned from the railroad station, we had returned his room to its usual state, artfully strewing socks on the chairs, his underwear on the table, and rumpling his bed. Georges was furious, almost in tears, as he explained to his fiancée that this was not the way he had left his room and that the fiends who had done this to him would be severely punished. The "fiends," meanwhile, had all assembled in my room, just across the hall, to enjoy his reaction. One evening, Daniel Atger and I perpetrated our own version of Orson Welles's invasion from Mars: a radio prank which sorely tested our Montpellier community. One of the sacred nightly rituals at the seminary was the communal listening to the broadcast of the BBC, which gave the latest news about the military and political situation. This was our link with the outside world. In the early months of 1944, an Allied landing somewhere in France, on the fortified beaches of Normandy or on the totally unprepared Mediterranean coast, was a growing possibility. The "wireless" in our community room was a fancy contraption, which had a gramophone, rarely used, in the top part of the cabinet. It also sported a set of headphones which could have enabled a student to listen to a program while others were either working or enjoying themselves noisily. I had discovered that by
plugging these headphones into the jack for the record player, and switching
the radio to the phonograph mode, the headphones could be made to serve
as a microphone. What I said into the headphones would be heard through
the loudspeaker as a "radio" transmission. Naturally, I kept this
discovery to myself, needing only the complicity of one other student to
put it to |
