There is no record of French having been taught in King’s College (1843-49) or for three years after the college was transformed into the University of Toronto in 1850. However, in 1852, presumably following a hotly debated decision to modernize the curriculum,³ the Caput recommended and the Senate nominated three candidates for a new chair of Modern Languages. In May the following year the government, wishing perhaps to lend as much dignity as possible to the guardian of an infant interloper, chose and appointed James Forneri.⁴

Surely none of our colleagues since has had such a wealth of colourful memories with which to regale his students. Born in 1789 into a cultivated Piedmontese family of French origin and a

graduate in law of a Roman university, young Forneri twice had his budding Turin law practice interrupted, first in 1812 by conscription as a cavalry officer in Napoleon’s garde d’honneur (although he was apparently not a hero in the retreat from Moscow, as his colleague Daniel Wilson liked to repeat⁵) and again in 1821, when he was exiled for having taken an active part in the Carbonari movement. Three more years as a cavalry officer, fighting for the liberal forces in Spain, ended when he was taken prisoner by the French troops of the Duc d’Angoulême. After some months at Agen, he reached England in 1824 as a political refugee. Following a decade of writing (poetry, articles on politics and education, and a German grammar) and teaching in private schools, he was appointed to the chair of Modern Languages in the Belfast Royal Academical Institution. It was from Ireland that he came to North America in 1851, first to Nova Scotia as master in the Collegiate School at Windsor. Although he was

already sixty-four when he took up his post in Toronto, he taught full programmes in French, German, Italian, and Spanish for thirteen years unassisted. After another year teaching only Italian and Spanish, he retired in 1867, still erect and vigorous, as shown in a photograph taken after his retirement.⁶ Contemporary appraisals of Forneri are far from unanimous. For Vice-Chancellor Langton, he was “a very worthy pudding-headed old Italian.”⁷ Daniel Wilson, fresh from Edinburgh, found him “amusingly simple.”⁸ More reliable, however, is the testimony of one of his students, who became the first lecturer in German in University College the year before Forneri’s retirement. William Henry Van der Smissen was critical of Forneri’s knowledge of German language and literature, his old-fashioned over-emphasis on translation and formal grammar at the expense of composition and conversation, and the fact that “in modern French

literature, only the classics of the 17th and 18th centuries existed for him.” But he recalled years later that “his lectures on Dante were both instructive and delightful” and that “Professor Forneri’s scholarship in the Romance Languages, including Old French and Provençal, was of a very high order.”⁹ Another former student, William Oldright, one of twenty-two Honour students in Modern Languages in 1859 and later lecturer in Italian while pursuing a distinguished career in medicine,¹⁰ testified to Forneri’s personal qualities as a teacher: “scrupulously punctual, truthful and the soul of honour, kind-hearted, affable and confidingly companionable, the veteran soldier and teacher secured a warm place in the hearts of his students.”¹¹ This estimate is echoed by Forneri’s most detailed biographer, John King. “He had a happy talent for communicating knowledge, and was beloved by his pupils and the students of his department for his patient kindness and untiring interest in the subject-matters of their reading.”¹²

In 1866 he had accepted as well an appointment as the first lecturer in French at Trinity College, then located on Queen Street. According to his student and successor John Squair, Pernet taught also “in some of the ladies’ schools.”¹³ It was there no doubt that he made most use of his own grammar, published in 1871.¹⁴ The comfortable, portly figure shown in photographs does not suggest such dashing about the city, presumably explained by the inadequacy of his lecturer’s salary, of which he sometimes spoke to his students. Economic pressure perhaps also explains his dubious venture, understandably cloaked in silence by

Squair in his Autobiography, of publishing a translation of a prescribed French matriculation text, with the face-saving device of some desultory “explanatory notes on the French text and pronunciation” and a caption on the title-page, “For the use of Teachers only.” The expression of the bearded face is, however, alert, and Squair says Pernet was lively, as well as diligent and punctual, though unsystematic and unscientific in his philology. He spoke both English and French with facility, but preferred French and spoke it with his classes when they were able to understand it. The lack of formal conversation classes appears to have been compensated for to some extent in the early 1880s by regular meetings of the Modern Language Club, in which he took an active and much appreciated interest. When he resigned in 1883, Pernet went to Philadelphia, where some years later he published an English-French phrase

book.¹⁵ At about the time it appeared in a revised and enlarged edition in 1895, he fell on the icy pavement while running for a trolley on his way to his School for Modern Languages and Translators. He suffered a fractured skull and brain injury, and spent his last twenty years in a sanatorium.

Pernet’s successor in 1883 was his best pupil, John Squair, born at Bowmanville, Upper Canada, in 1850. After farming for two years and teaching school for three more, Squair had prepared himself for university at the Bowmanville High School

and by living with French and German families in the province, a practice he continued with determined relish during his four years (1879-83) as an undergraduate. Although his programme included Greek and Latin, “Mechanics”

and Chemistry, “Mental Philosophy and Logic,” and Ethnology, his main work was in Honour Modern Languages and History. His student career was punctuated by prizes in History, English, French, German, and Italian (all duly recorded in his Autobiography) and crowned with the gold medal in Modern Languages. He was the student founder of the Modern Language Club in 1881 and its first president. It is not surprising that Pernet and Van der Smissen (whom Squair refers to as his two most intimate teachers) offered him a newly created fellowship (i.e., assistantship) in French and German for the 1883-84 year, nor that he accepted it after some hesitation in view of “the smallness of salary ($500) for a man of thirty-three.” Returning to Toronto in mid-September after spending two months with his favourite French

family at Sandwich, he met Pernet on the street, to be greeted with that gentleman’s exclamation, “I’m glad to see you; I’ve resigned.” A few days later Squair was engaged, at $125 a month for eight months, to do the French lecturer’s work “until a French Lecturer is appointed.”¹⁶

Henry Rushton Fairclough, a classmate and colleague for a few years before he went to Stanford University for an outstanding career as a classicist, recorded nearly fifty years later his recollections of Squair in the 1880s. “‘Honest John,’ as he was known, was a rugged conservative in appearance and in temperament, the very antipodes of the conventional French type; but he knew the Gallic tongue.”¹⁷ What Fairclough did not know or say was that Squair had formed strong impressions about how the teaching of French could be

improved and was eager for an opportunity to put his ideas into practice. The success with which he fulfilled his unexpected responsibility is demonstrated by a document dated 10 April 1884 in which twenty-nine of his students in French, representing all four years, expressed the hope that Mr Squair would be appointed to a chair in Romance Languages, the establishment of which was being debated. In what must be the earliest recorded “student evaluation,” these undergraduates – several of them, including George Henry Needler, later colleagues – expressed their “entire satisfaction with the conduct of the sub-department of French during the past session” of University College and drew a memorable portrait of the man who was to direct the department for thirty-two years until his retirement in 1916.

Mr Squair ... has given evidence of having not only an accurate and extensive

knowledge of French, but of possessing also those rarer and no less essential qualities which constitute the successful teacher. His frank and manly bearing, his accuracy and skill in imparting instruction, together with his enthusiastic earnestness, must always command respect and awaken enthusiasm in those with whom he comes in contact.¹⁸

Squair in his Autobiography also quotes “a much better testimonial than he expected to receive” from the president of University College, Daniel Wilson, acknowledging “the zeal and perseverance with which he has carried on the work of the department.” But these were sterile words; for three years Squair served as temporary lecturer in French without any formal notice of continuance. The proposed chair in Romance Languages was obviously in his mind during the summers of 1884 and 1885, spent in Paris, since he took lessons not only in

conversational French (to supplement faithful attendance at the Comédie Française) but also in Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Beginning in 1885, after the Senate had restored Spanish to the curriculum following a lapse of eight years but without making any arrangements for instruction, Squair responded to student requests by giving lectures in third and fourth year. His teaching of Spanish was “contrary to the desires of the President of the College” and he received no recognition or remuneration.¹⁹

In 1887, however, the imminent entry into federation with the University of Toronto of Victoria College put an end to Squair’s teaching outside the field of French. Under the University of Toronto Act of 1887, Italian and Spanish became “university subjects,” with William Henry Fraser as lecturer. The same act provided for French to be taught in University College by a professor, a lecturer,

and a fellow, but the professorship would not be filled for some years. All Squair gained was an official appointment as lecturer and an increase in salary from $1,000 to $1,500. He had already been assisted for a few hours each week by two able fellows whom we shall meet again in the next chapter, Charles Whetham and John Home Cameron. From 1887 to 1890 the assisting fellow was Alexander Francis Chamberlain, whose interest and publications in the fields of French-Canadian language and folk etymology²⁰ were to continue after his appointment in 1892 to the staff in anthropology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.²¹

Squair himself was always genuinely interested in French Canada, having begun his study of French in high school, he tells us, largely because he considered it his duty to be able to understand his fellow countrymen through their language. In the

summer of 1887 he went to live for two months in Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré to study the speech of the habitants. On his return to Toronto he recorded his findings in a paper read before the philological section of the Canadian Institute and published in the proceedings of the institute in October 1888 as “A Contribution to the Study of the Franco-Canadian Dialect.” This study, devoted mainly to describing “peculiar” pronunciation by indicating English or French equivalents, was a worthy pioneer venture but a perilous one, and it is perhaps fortunate that he found no time to continue it.²² Instead, he devoted himself to the first of his long and useful series of annotated high school French texts, published by W.J. Gage and Company: Lamartine’s Christophe Colomb in 1886, Sylvestre’s Un Philosophe sous les toits in 1887, Daudet’s La Belle Nivernaise and Louis Enault’s Le Chien du capitaine in 1890. He also began a famous collaboration with W.H. Fraser, to which we shall return in the next chapter.

Collaboration of a different order was necessitated by the great fire of 14 February 1890, which completely destroyed the university library, housed in what is now the East Hall of University College. Lost were about a thousand French books; a manuscript list made by Professor Pernet before his departure in 1883 was preserved by Squair and later bound and presented to the library. When he asked for authority to replace the books for class use that had been burned in the private room of the staff in French on the ground flfloor of the east wing, President Wilson informed him that the ten dollars requested could not be spared. In one of the choicer passages in his Autobiography (159-60), Squair describes how he tried unsuccessfully to persuade John George Hodgins, librarian of the provincial Department of Education, to transfer to the university twenty-three volumes of French classics from Montaigne to Madame de Staël, bound in half-calf and little used. Hodgins informed him with some asperity that the books had been bought in

France by Egerton Ryerson himself and would stay where they were. Squair reports seeing them later in the Legislative Library, “looking but little the worse for the thirty-seven years that have been added to their age.”²³