L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu. Hypocrasy is a hommage vice pays to virtue. I cannot teach this maxim of La Rochefoucauld without thinking of Ma, who would say (or did she just say she used to say?) "Don't you have enough respect to lie to me?" I like La Rochefoucauld's rescuing of hypocrasy's element of goodness. There are so many degrees of nuance in the continuum from emulation to simulation to dissimulation.

Today I have been thinking about Lhomond. The Abbé Lhomond was not that important a person, really. He was a Latinist of the late 18th and early 19th century, who wrote a summary of Roman history called "De viris illustribus . . .", of which I have a copy. The introduction says "il sut se faire aimer de ses élèves" if I remember correctly. He also wrote a summary of "sacred history." He was of those clerics who chose not to sign the oath of allegiance to the new (revolutionary) régime. He was therefore to be guillotined, but was saved--it is said--by a former student of some influence who exclaimed "On ne touche pas à Lhomond!" There is something sacred beyond regimes in a revered teacher--even if he is a humble grammarian and Latinist.

Lots of ideas this morning, but the best have probably gotten away from me already. One of my thoughts was to use blogs for individual students in my French conversation class next semester. They would have to write a full square (like the one I am writing in now) in French each day. Ils pourraient écrire la moitié sur ce dont on avait parlé la fois précedente, et l'autre moitié sur ce dont on va parler, par exemple. A propos, אפשר לכתב עברי פה