Gilles Joffre accompanied his son to the capital, and left him in a
private school. Like his son, the cooper was a man of few words; but
what he must have done at parting was to clap the boy on the shoulder,
and say: "Now, go to it!"
Joseph Joffre did. When he returned to his boyhood's home, only four
years later, he was wearing the shoulder straps of a lieutenant, and had
seen active service. But this is getting ahead of our story.
There was really nothing else for him to do but to "go to it" here in
Paris. He was a big, hulking lad of fifteen, with a bullet head set upon
a thick neck and broad shoulders--an awkward figure dressed in
ill-fitting clothes. All his life Joffre paid little attention to dress.
Here at the awkward age he looked out of place with the well-dressed city
boys. They tried to have fun at his expense, but he withdrew into his
shell more than ever, and they soon learned to let him alone.
It must have been a lonely life that young Joffre led--but we have no
direct evidence that he ever felt lonely. His books and his day dreams
seem always to have made up for a lack of human companionship. The other
fellows contented themselves with saying of him: "He is too slow, and
methodical to amount to much."
He did not, indeed, make a specially brilliant record in his entrance
examinations to the Polytechnique; but his stumbling block was not
mathematics or science, it was--German! He never could abide the
language!
Joseph Joffre entered this famous military training school in 1869, at
the age of seventeen.
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