"_Oh, le bon temps, que ce si??cle de fer!_"
In truth, the ardor, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness of my
disposition, soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates,
and by slow but natural gradations gave me an ascendancy over all not
greatly older than myself: over all with a single exception. This
exception was found in the person of a scholar who, although no
relation, bore the same Christian and surname as myself,--a
circumstance, in fact, little remarkable; for, notwithstanding a noble
descent, mine was one of those every-day appellations which seem by
prescriptive right to have been, time out of mind, the common property
of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as
William Wilson,--a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the
real. My namesake alone, of those who in school-phraseology
constituted "our set," presumed to compete with me in the studies of
the class--in the sports and broils of the play-ground--to refuse
implicit belief in my assertions, and submission to my will--indeed,
to interfere with my arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever.
If there is on earth a supreme and unqualified despotism, it is the
despotism of a master-mind in boyhood over the less energetic spirits
of its companions.
Wilson's rebellion was to me a source of the greatest embarrassment;
the more so as, in spite of the bravado with which in public I made a
point of treating him and his pretensions, I secretly felt that I
feared him, and could not help thinking the equality, which he
maintained so easily with myself, a proof of his true superiority;
since not to be overcome cost me a perpetual struggle.
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