My Teacher, My Fellow Student

What you are about to read may or may not be completely true. It was a long time ago.

Lucien Boisvert, who taught me French during all three years of high school in Hamden, CT, did not leave a big footprint on the world. When I Googled his name to get some information for this essay, I found more than a few Lucien Boisverts; evidently his combination of first and last names is popular in French-speaking Canada. Finally, I found a photo of a headstone in a cemetery in Bethany, Connecticut: Lucien R. Boisvert, October 19, 1930–May 31, 2003. “A good and decent man.”

It figured to be his—but 1930! So long ago—could I have had such an ancient teacher? Then I remembered that I graduated high school in 1964. When I first had M. Boisvert—always “Monsieur”—in class, in the fall of 1961, he was thirty years old.

And, of course, I remember what he looked like then—despite the crew cut, a souvenir of his time in the Marine Corps, a young Jean-Paul Belmondo, object of many crushes and subject of much mystery. Susan Orlean, in her essay for this series, wrote that she neither knew nor wondered about the private life of her favorite teacher, Mr. Heaps (who, for all she cared, had no first name). By contrast, we—I mean the girls in his class—yearned to know everything about M. Boisvert’s life and feasted on whatever crumb he occasionally dropped.

Is this what I remember, or what I fantasized? He was born into a French-Canadian family in a central Connecticut factory town. School was not a priority and he left home early and joined the Marines. After his discharge, he earned a GED, went to college, and presto! became a high school French teacher. Along the way he had several children—mes petits amis was how he referred to them. He didn’t seem to live with these children and he was not, I’m quite sure, married when we knew him. Was there a woman in his life? Where did he live? Who knew?

Of course, who knew anything about the private lives of their teachers? Ray Rapuano, a beloved English teacher who taught AP English and served as advisor to the school newspaper (of which I was the editor), lived with his parents and helped them care for an intellectually disabled brother. We both knew that and didn’t know it; it seemed so distant from Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot and other gems of the canon that he led us through. In the same way, we both knew and didn’t know that he was gay, whatever that meant within the constraints of his life and of the times.

All of us in AP English were readers, of course. Why else would we have been there? What Mr. Rapuano did, at least for me, was to unlock the wonders of poetry. I remember many of the poems and the almost physical experience of encountering and grasping them for the first time. In August 2017, I traveled with my family to Casper, Wyoming, to observe the solar eclipse. Casper was a destination of choice for that event because totality would hit there at high noon and the summer sky was likely to be clear. Lying back on the grass, waiting for the eclipse to begin, I suddenly flashed back to Archibald MacLeish’s great poem, “You, Andrew Marvell”: “And here face down beneath the sun / And here upon earth’s noonward height / To feel the always coming on / The always rising of the night . . .”

I recited what I could of it and then remembered I had my phone with me. A quick search brought up the whole text, which I read aloud as the shadow took its first bite out of the sun. For those few minutes, I was back in English class, the last period of the day. Mr. Rapuano’s favorite poet was Emily Dickinson. When I graduated, he gave me a volume of Dickinson’s complete work. It is on my shelf sixty years later, along with the many other books of poetry acquired over the decades.

Hamden High School was then and still is the only public high school in Hamden, a New Haven suburb of some sixty thousand people. There were about five hundred students in my graduating class. Although almost all were white, we were a diverse lot: the children of Yale faculty members and the children of first- or second-generation immigrants from southern Italy. About half the graduating seniors went to college, most to public colleges within the state. I can’t vouch for how well the school did for them or for the non-college bound half of the class. But for those with more ambitious aspirations, Hamden High did very well.

The College Board’s advanced placement program was still quite new in the early 1960s, and Hamden embraced it full bore. I earned enough AP credits during senior year to enter Radcliffe College at Harvard with sophomore standing—a mistake I quickly corrected, becoming a freshman by the end of my first semester. Remarkably for a public high school, Hamden offered AP French Literature for the only two seniors who wanted to take it, myself and my friend Polly, a Yale professor’s daughter who had spent her father’s sabbatical year in a French school in Paris and had returned with an enviable accent. I don’t know whether the school twisted M. Boisvert’s arm to teach it or whether, as I strongly suspect, it was his idea.

The enrollment record would show that there were two of us in the class, but there were really three. Hamden High had never offered it before, so it was as new to our teacher as it was to Polly and me. The syllabus was deep and rigorous, consisting of the classics of French literature over the centuries: The Song of Roland, Racine, Molière, Sartre, Camus, short stories, poetry. (I looked on the College Board website for the current curriculum, only to learn that the AP French Literature exam hasn’t been offered since 2008.) The learning curve was steep and the rewards were equally shared among the three of us. The language happened to be French, but what the course really taught through the close reading that it demanded was the joy of language itself.

Even if most of the works on the AP syllabus were familiar to M. Boisvert, he certainly hadn’t taught them before. I suspect some were new to him, although he never admitted as much. That would have been breaking the fourth wall between teacher and student, something he never did. But it didn’t matter. We were our own three-way study group in our fashion.

The Stranger, at once so simple and so complex, stood out for me, in part because it was obviously very important to him. I still have the paperback edition we used, close to falling apart now after years of re-reading. Tucked inside the front cover is a folded and faded mimeographed sheet. It is an essay Camus wrote some years after the novel was published, clarifying his intention as an author and explaining why he loved the unlovable character he had created—why he meant no blasphemy when he described Meursault as “the only Christ we deserve.” I’m not sure where M. Boisvert had come upon this essay, which for years remained unpublished and unfindable. Now, thanks to the Internet, anyone can read it in an awkward Google translation, but I cherish my original copy and can recite most of it by heart—yes, in French.

I was surprised to learn from my Internet research that M. Boisvert lived until the age of seventy-two. Not that seventy-two is old, certainly not from my current vantage point. But I had assumed that he had died at a much younger age. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because he smoked. Or maybe because it seemed more romantic for this elusive and compelling figure of my youth to have died young. In any case, it wasn’t until I began teaching at the age of sixty-one that I fully grasped what M. Boisvert had demonstrated all those years before—that to teach is to learn, and that the most memorable teaching comes when teacher and students learn together.

Copyright © 2025 by Linda Greenhouse

LINDA GREENHOUSE covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times between 1978 and 2008, and continues to write for the newspaper’s Opinion pages. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Her books include Becoming Justice Blackmun; Before Roe v. Wade (with Reva Siegel); The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction; The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right (with Michael J. Graetz); the memoir Just a Journalist; and, most recently, Justice on the Brink: A Requiem for the Supreme Court. She is a senior research scholar in law at Yale Law School, and led a master class for the Academy for Teachers in 2022.