Figure 1.--This French boy is practing marbles at home in preparation for games with his schoolmates. This 7-year old boy wears a sailor suit with curls. His mother added a hairbow when he was at home.

One French account described a boy's experience in the 1900s at his lycee. Details on the boy's experiences at the Lycee, including his clothes and long hair are available: Paul.

Style

... in the court of the lycee, marbles was king. Paul's father had taught him how to play marbles, the way they play in Toulouse which is much more sportsmanlike than the usual fashion of the Paris schoolboy. In Toulouse the boys don't play at marbles as if they were throwing stones. First you press, not the thumbnail but the joint above the nail, against the marble, wedging it against the inner side of the second phalanx of the first finger. If you aim accurately you can put your marble just where you want it and fully 9 feet away. That was the way Paul played marbles. Indeed it was that game that first taught him the difference between his right and his left hand. For years when any one said "right," his thumb doubled up instinctively under his first finger as if he were casting a marble. At the lycee, Paul had no match when it came to marbles. Every time he played he won all the marbles at stake in the little triangle. Vainly his comrades set up against him the big stone "calots." He drove them away every time. Rashly they tried out their prize glass ones, marvelously iridescent, with rainbow colored spirals inside. Paul won them all.

Trading

By trading off his winnings two dozen glass marbles acquired the two finest marbles in the court, a blond agate and an onyx circled with black and white like one of the planets on the chart of the sky. Trade of all kinds flourished in the court. It interested Paul only in so far as it concerned marbles, but many of his comrades took great delight in speculations of all sorts, like a band of shrewd little merchants. Everything offered a pretext for selling and swapping. The most coveted object was the--fountain pen which no one owned except two or South Americans, dark-skinned boys whom a chauffeur with a bristling fur cape brought to school each morning in an electric phaeton. Even fountain pens had little attraction for Paul.

The Collection and Battles

But at home his collection of marbles grew amazingly, filling a whole row of cardboard boxes. To him his marbles came to have a sort of identity, almost an existence of their own. Having neither brothers nor sisters nor friends with whom to play, he peopled his lonely holidays with the throng of marbles. Thursday when his tasks were finished, after a walk with papa in the Louvre, he shut himself up in his room with the marbles. Paul had no tin soldiers. Stupid things, he considered them, with their silly frozen gestures of attack, defense, or parade, and that never advanced except when they tumbled down. Marbles were different; they were wonderful little creatures that moved by themselves. With them, Paul staged battle after battle; partly because he loved movement and partly because all the history he learned was composed of battles. An old sword served him as river. Boxes were the mountains, and an old lace scarf stood for the forest. So much for the topography of his battlefields. With that he reacted Crecy, Marignano, Fontenoy, Wagram, Eylau, and Austerlitz, and better still imaginary battles which he planned with magnificent strategy. The stone marbles had all the colors of the different uniforms: feldgriin, feldgrau, reseda, blue like the chasseurs-a'-cheval, red like the trousers of the infantry, black like the horsemen of Saumur, and khaki like the English soldiers in the Transvaal. As for the glass ones with their colored visors, they were the officers with stripes like the officers of the National Guard. The enemy generals, the agate and the black and white onyx, each with its general staff, occupied a distant height out of reach of bullets and shell. He pictured them standing there, eyes glued to a spyglass and three fingers of the left hand thrust in the opening of a military vest. In some of the battles hundreds of marbles took part. Paul quite forgot that he was only a timid little boy. He was a great general, no, two generals at the same time. He sent whole regiments of cavalry crashing one against the other, rolling over the floor with a rumble like thunder. The big stone "calots" of the artillery rained down on the serried battalions scattering them in all directions; on every hand bands of fugitives took refuge beneath the furniture. The armoire h glace was a sanctuary because of the danger of breaking the mirror. But chairs and tables offered pitiful shelter in which the unwary were cut down without mercy by the enemy cavalry. The heights with their wooden walls were much safer. The cavalry could not dislodge their occupants. But the raking fire of the artillery finally succeeded in clearing the ground. A battery on wheels (a pen box and four big marbles), the ancestor of the tank, worked terrible ravages in the enemy ranks, but finished by swamping when it crossed the river. There it was captured to a man by a detachment of cavalry. Paul directed operations with relative impartiality. As he never could tell in advance how the marbles would scatter, each fresh maneuver forced him, to change the tactics of one or the other of the belligerent armies. Like a god of battles he ruled over the moving people of marbles, as anonymous, of as little importance in the eyes of the war god as if they were actual soldiers. So Paul, in his first year at school learned that history is only a series of battles and that life itself is very like history.

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Created: September 6, 1998
Last updated: February 8, 2002