Monsieur Ducroz

Monsieur Ducroz, Philip Carey’s French teacher in Heidelberg, is a taciturn, courteous former revolutionary living in poverty. His carefully observed manners contrast with the upheavals of his past, while his illness and dependence on the money Philip gives him expose the hunger beneath his formal reserve. Through Ducroz, the lessons become more than instruction: they offer Philip a glimpse of political defeat, material hardship, and the distance between giving help and receiving it.

Identity and Background

Ducroz is a citizen of Geneva and an elderly French teacher whose life has been marked by political struggle and displacement. Tall and gaunt, with long, thinning gray hair, he wears shabby black clothes, frayed trousers, and linen that Philip has never seen clean. He charges little for his lessons and conducts them with strict punctuality, arriving as the clock strikes and leaving precisely on time. His teaching is conscientious but without enthusiasm; he is a man of few words, and Philip learns much of his background indirectly rather than through his own disclosures.

Ducroz had fought with Garibaldi against the Pope. He left Italy in disgust after concluding that the pursuit of a republic and political freedom had merely exchanged one form of subjection for another, and he had also been expelled from Geneva for unspecified political offenses. The narrator imagines the earlier Ducroz amid the revolutionary movements of 1848: a young man animated by liberty, involved in argument and fighting, and driven from place to place. That history is set against his present existence in a small town, where he earns his living from poor students and appears worn down by age, illness, and want. The account leaves his present thoughts uncertain: his silence might conceal contempt or disillusionment, but it might equally reflect exhaustion.

Lessons and Political Past

Ducroz’s reserve makes the past difficult for Philip to approach directly. When Philip bluntly asks whether it is true that he fought with Garibaldi, Ducroz answers simply that it is. Philip then asks about the Commune; Ducroz does not confirm the claim, but asks whether they can return to their work. The exchange shows both that the revolutionary past is real and that Ducroz declines to turn it into a story for his pupil. He opens the book, and Philip, intimidated by the response, translates the passage he has prepared.

The contrast between the old teacher’s quiet manners and the imagined fervor of his youth gives his history its particular force. Philip’s idea of a revolutionary does not readily accommodate this low-voiced, elaborately polite man, who waits to be asked before sitting and removes his hat with ceremony when they meet in the street. Ducroz’s past is therefore conveyed not through self-dramatization but through the gulf between the liberty he once pursued and the impoverished life to which he has come.

Illness and Philip’s Assistance

One day Ducroz struggles up the many stairs to Philip’s room and is plainly unwell. He sits heavily, his face drawn and sweat on his forehead, but dismisses Philip’s concern as inconsequential. Philip, uneasy about discussing money, tells him he will continue paying for the lessons and offers payment for the following week in advance. Ducroz charges eighteen pence an hour; Philip places a tenmark piece on the table, trying to give the money without making the teacher feel like a beggar.

Ducroz accepts the coin without an elaborate expression of gratitude, saying only that he will not come again until he is better. Philip is disappointed: imagining that he has acted generously, he expects the gift to overwhelm its recipient. Ducroz returns five or six days later, still weak and more unsteady, and says at the door that without the money he would have starved; it was all he had to live on. He then bows solemnly and leaves. Philip feels a lump in his throat as he begins to understand the bitterness of Ducroz’s struggle and the difference between the pleasure of giving and the necessity of receiving.

Character and Significance

Ducroz’s behavior is defined by restraint. Even when ill and in need, he maintains the formal relation of teacher and pupil: he accepts advance payment as payment for lessons, rather than presenting himself as an object of charity. His manner preserves a measure of dignity, but it also prevents Philip from immediately recognizing the gravity of his need. The eventual disclosure that the tenmark piece was essential to his survival overturns Philip’s first impression of the exchange without making Ducroz suddenly confessional or dependent in manner.

His political history and economic present form a further contrast. A man once committed to freedom is now constrained by illness and by the small income he can earn from teaching poor students. The narrative does not resolve whether Ducroz’s silence reflects disillusionment with humanity or simple weariness; instead, it sets that uncertainty beside material facts—his shabby clothes, modest fee, difficult climb, and reliance on Philip’s money. Ducroz’s brief presence thus broadens Philip’s education beyond French: it confronts him with the costs of a failed ideal and with a hardship he had not understood from the comfortable side of generosity.