The young Nodier, down from the Jura Mountains, reached Strasbourg at night and took accommodation at the Hôtel de la Lanterne, run by Madame Tesch, who gazed at him tenderly: to her, the young boy looked like a girl in disguise. He slept little: “By daybreak I was wandering the empty streets, amazed by everything, and gripped by a kind of ecstasy in front of that magnificent cathedral, which the ancient world would have included among its marvels.¹⁴³ Never in my life had I seen anything like that choir of angels and saints which was surrounded by myriad figures that seemed to rise up to the heights of celestial Jerusalem, rising among the rich transparent embroideries and lace of its miraculous architecture. A hammer blow tore me from my meditation, and I saw the head of a saint roll to my feet. There was another resounding blow and this time the bust of the Virgin fell with child in arms. I tried to fathom where all this was coming from, and could see a man perched in the portal, on the shoulders of an enormous apostle, hammering left and right, uttering frightening curses against those gothic portrayals of the Lord’s elect. People gradually gathered in excited groups, from which there were bursts of laughter, dark utterances and dull murmurs. It took me quite some time to make sense of that frenzy, which hadn’t yet reached the foothills of the Jura.”

Madame Tesch immediately explained to her guest that Abbé Schneider was now called Citizen Schneider, and it was now imperative that his young pupil address him in familiar terms. These opening words were already enough to disturb Nodier. The pupil was received by a surly servant girl. “Breakfast was served. It was a plate of oysters, rara concha in terris, a plate of anchovies, a bowl of olives, and a tankard of beer. Citizen Schneider came in, laid his two pistols on the table, and, after a curt greeting to me, sat down.

“I approached and handed him my father’s letter.¹⁴⁴ After the first two lines he took my hand, addressing me with I don’t know what phrase in Greek, to which I replied that I didn’t yet have the fortune to know a word of Greek; he then invited me for lunch and, upon my refusal, to dinner. I had no reason to decline. Nevertheless, I would have preferred to dine at Madame Tesch’s.”

Citizen Schneider makes his appearance: “He was a man of thirty-five, ugly, fat, short and ordinary, with rounded limbs, round head.¹⁴⁵ What made him most unusual was his livid gray face, with red blotches here and there, and the contrast between his black, short-cropped hair and his dark bushy eyebrows, under which flashed two wild eyes, shaded by light brown lashes. Endowed with an immense aptitude for learning, and a spirit full of irony, along with which I invariably found cruelty, there was nothing about him that stirred any feeling, any emotion, nothing that touched the heart.” The first rule that Nodier’s Greek teacher laid down was that he should in no circumstances mix with “popular society,” as Saint-Just called it, since it was “infected by the Convention’s evil principles of moderatism.”¹⁴⁶