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IV STUDENT PRANKS In spite of all the tension and danger, daily life continued. But food was scarce, and Dean Leenhardt was concerned about all these young people living on a diet of rutabagas and turnips, the only food available without ration cards. Never short of clever ideas, our Dean devised a scheme which would meet our needs as well as those of an industrially-inclined member of his family. One of his brothers had bought a large bakery, in which he fabricated, with I do not know what ersatz flour, some cone-shaped and awful-tasting cookies. These he marketed, but not very successfully even in that time when cookies were generally unavailable. Our seminary, on the other hand, was a perfect market for his cookies. We were fed, day in and day out, with the "broken" cookies, of which there were far too many to have been broken accidentally. The actual name of the cookies escapes me, as we called them only by the name of the firm, SABI, (Société Anonyme de Biscuiterie Industrielle), which soon became the name of the Dean himself. "Sabi" was a short and fun name, replacing the name Leenhardt advantageously. Other professors had nicknames even less complimentary, such as Cocoi, our professor of Hebrew, who lisped, and whom we accused of improperly differentiating between the Hebrew letters "schin" and "sin" by pronouncing "sin" with a lisp and showing the proper location of the diacritical point by raising the right or left side of his mouth. Our professor of philosophy and apologetics was called Toufou because of his habit of losing things. He also never knew where he had ended the previous lesson. Even more than our teachers, our fellow students were targets. Once, we wanted to show our student President how dangerous his gluttony could be. We arranged for our handyman to walk through the dining hall during lunch, carrying a beautiful bottle of Burgundy wine. Since our President hailed from that region, he immediately confiscated the bottle in order to taste it. Putting it to his mouth, he swallowed a good mouthful of vinegar, which he spat out all over the table, to a storm of laughter. Hazing was a solid tradition
of the school. On the appointed night in November all the first year
students were sent collectively to the movies. The film was always
chosen carefully, from the list posted at the front door of a nearby Catholic
church; we always chose one against which the Roman Catholic censors advised
most adamantly. We were thus assured that the freshmen would have
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