completed by his students in the classes of professors Squair and Cameron at University College, and he died the same year. John Petch left warm memories of an urbane, highly considerate teacher and colleague. An “In Memoriam” in the Victoria College calendar for 1897-98 records “the accuracy of his scholarship, the conscientious care manifested in all his work, his ability as a teacher and his sympathy with the student.”

The French Department at Victoria in 1897 again came under the direction of a teacher whose main concern lay elsewhere. Oscar Pelham Edgar had just completed his PhD in English at Johns Hopkins University when he was appointed “Lecturer in the French Language and Literature” at Victoria. Five years later, he was the Elizabeth Gooderham Professor of French Language and

There is no suggestion that Edgar in any way neglected his responsibilities in French. He had been a Governor General’s medallist in Modern Languages at University College in 1892 and for three years a Moderns master in Upper Canada College. In 1902 he established a Victoria College prize in French composition bearing his name. His interest in French criticism, theatre, and poetry are reflected in his competent school edition of Labiche’s Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon (1908) and, more importantly, an

reading of “Les Djinns” or “La Nuit de mai,” some testimony that in French too, “he taught literature as much in the fashion of a score as a libretto.”⁹

We may be sure that students of both French and English shared in their appreciation of Pelham Edgar’s own idiosyncrasy of wrapping his legs around the heavy oak lectern from which he liked to read his lectures. This is most delightfully evoked by a caricatural portrait found in Acta Victoriana, in which the long encircling legs describe an appropriately lyrical figure eight. It was the work of a University College undergraduate in Moderns, invited one day by a Victoria College friend (Norman Endicott) to hear – and witness – a lecture by Pelham Edgar. The student artist, already using the now familiar signature “R,” began teaching in the Department of French at University College five years later; his

name was Robert Finch.¹⁰

Another portrait, depicting Edgar with his cherished lectern, may still be seen in Hart House, painted by J. Fergus Kyle about 1909 as one of fifteen cartoons of faculty members enlivening the stained-glass windows of the former University Faculty Club, now the gallery dining-room. Here it is Edgar’s arms that hold the lectern in a protective embrace, immortalizing an incident well told in Sissons’s history of Victoria College.

Edgar at times lectured in what was known as Dr. Bell’s room (24), and he would have the lectern moved into the room for the occasion. Bell, who liked – and required – space on the platform, as frequently instructed the janitor to remove it, and became increasingly incensed when he found it back and in his way. This

happened once too often. Striding into the room from his office, he found the detested bauble again on the platform, walked to the southeast window, threw it open, called a student to help him, and together they heaved the lectern from the second storey to the lawn below.¹¹

One wonders whether either the eloquent poetic spellbinder or the irascible classical philologist, both former teachers of seventeenth-century French masterpieces, realized how well they had demonstrated to the students the timelessness of a “classical” theme, that of Boileau’s burlesque epic Le Lutrin.

Both John Petch and, after him, Pelham Edgar taught all the French literature courses single-handed but were assisted in language courses by a French-born instructor. Of “Monsieur J. Cusin,” who fulfilled this function in 1893-95, we

know nothing. His successor, Eugène A. Masson, was instructor for ten years. Born at Lisieux, France, in 1857, he came to North America at the age of thirty, taught first in various schools in New York and the Maritimes, and was principal of the Ingres-Coutellier School in Montreal for a time before coming to Toronto. From 1892 until his appointment at Victoria in 1895, he taught in the Model School, Havergal College, Miss Veal’s, and the Conservatory of Music. A warmly appreciative obituary by Pelham Elgar in Acta Victoriana, accompanied by a handsome photograph, recalls his signal energy and inspiration as a tutor. “Up to the time of his death his services were eagerly sought by individuals anxious to acquire proficiency in French, and I think it may safely be said that no more capable or conscientious teacher has ever won the lasting esteem of all who came into contact with him.”¹² Several years of Acta record the large audiences

The blazing eyes over the great black beard soften to a benevolent twinkle as he

returns to the interrupted subject.The same generation began in 1907 to receive more rigorous training in French literature, as well as in language, from a new young lecturer from south of the border. Victor de Beaumont had earned an ma at Columbia University, studied abroad, and taught for three years at Williams College in Massachusetts. The son of an American of French extraction, himself a linguist and language teacher, de Beaumont was bilingual and a perfectionist who expected of his students the same love of learning and the same punctilious preparation he brought to his teaching. He published an edition of a Labiche play in 1911 but never found time to publish more. Thirty years later we shall see him become head of the French Department, but now the college was looking farther afield for a new head.

Haffkina Snow, who after a year as lecturer, was associate professor for three years until he resigned in 1915. Sissons pictures him as “a fresh-complexioned, rotund little man with a dark, pointed beard.” No one with such a name could fail to leave his mark, especially when he fell flat on his face one day as he entered a lecture room, enabling Acta Victoriana to hail the event as the first Snow-fall of the year. Two of his students, though agreeing that he was an interesting teacher, still remember the irresistible inspiration of his middle name for collaborative poetic creation during his Old French class, to which they contributed alternating lines, such as

Francis Haffkina, You're quite a maligner. We wish you were off on an African liner.The same reporters arouse our curiosity by references to his lovely Russian “companion,” who was

never accepted by Victoria College, and Sissons whets it further in a remark of unusually intemperate indulgence when he tells us that Snow’s main asset, his gift for languages, was balanced by “his main liabilities, a peppery temper and ‘Madame Snow.’”¹³ Our appetite is fed, but hardly satisfied, by local scraps of printed information: an article in the Toronto Star on 11 November 1914 revealing that an address to the International Polity Club was a lyrical panegyric of Russian culture and an article written for the University Monthly, after he had left Toronto for the State University of Iowa, again offering an effusive encomium of the Russian language and “soul” and making it clear that he would be willing to return to Toronto to head a Department of Slavic Studies.¹⁴ And we scent a real mystery when we find that Harvard alumni directories list no Francis Haffkina Snow.

A visit to the Harvard University Archives soon dispels the mystery, however, for Francis Woolson Snow was a graduate of that university in 1903, taught French and Italian there for two years, and was married in 1906 to his second wife, Elena Borisovna Haffkina, whom he had met in Russia during a year abroad. He studied at Columbia University in 1906-11, and took his PhD there, with a thesis on the medieval religious lyric, before accepting a position at Toronto under his pen name, Francis Haffkina Snow. His free-wheeling autobiographical reports in the anniversary volumes of the Harvard class of 1903, especially the twenty-fifth,¹⁵ give good evidence of the high colour he could bring to his lectures at Toronto. But French was only one of the thirty languages he claimed to have acquired, and his interest in it appears to have waned. In 1933, when he visited France on a European tour, he was shocked by “the growing disintegration of the