Język angielski, matura przykładowa 2015 - poziom rozszerzony - pytania i odpowiedzi

It was November. The sky was dark when I turned into Laundress Passage. Father had finished for the day, switched off the shop lights and closed the shutters; so I would not come home to darkness he had left on the light over the stairs to the flat. Through the glass in the door it cast a rectangle of paleness onto the wet pavement, and it was while I was standing in that rectangle, about to turn the key, that I first saw the letter. Another white rectangle, lying just at my feet. I couldn’t miss it.

I took the letter, went inside and put the shop key in its usual place behind Bailey’s Geometry. Poor Bailey. No one has wanted his fat gray book for thirty years. Sometimes I wonder what he makes of his role as guardian of the bookshop keys. I don’t suppose it’s the destiny he had in mind for the masterwork that he spent two decades writing.

A letter. For me. That was something of an event. The crisp-cornered envelope, puffed up with its thickly folded contents, was addressed in a hand that must have given the postman a certain amount of trouble. The style of the writing was old-fashioned, with its decorative capitals and curly flourishes, and my first impression was that it had been written by a child. The letters seemed untrained. Their uneven strokes either faded into nothing or were heavily marked on the paper. There was no sense of flow in the letters that spelled out my name. Each had been undertaken separately – M A R G A R E T L E A – as a new and daunting enterprise. But I knew no children. That is when I thought – it is the hand of an invalid.

It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, some unknown person had gone to the trouble of marking my name onto this envelope. Who was it who had had his mind’s eye on me while I hadn’t suspected a thing?

Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. I never read anything without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and passed out for a moment. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now.

I opened the letter and pulled out a sheaf of half a dozen pages, all written in the same laborious script.

It’s one of three such English-language letters by Napoleon in the world, according to the auction organizers. After fierce bidding which included a number of English collectors, it was bought by the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris. The selling price – five times what had been predicted – suggests the document’s historic value. It’s evident from the letter that Napoleon, who had famously dismissed England as a nation of shopkeepers, decided to learn the language of Shakespeare late in life.

Napoleon wrote the letter while detained by the British on the remote island of Saint Helen’s. The standard-sized sheet of paper is a homework exercise Napoleon sent to an English teacher for correction in 1816. In a moment of surprising humility, Napoleon asks his teacher in the letter to indulge him and correct his mistakes. If you ever look at the copy, you will notice there is plenty of room for corrections.

The auction house president, Jean-Pierre Osenat, says “My view is that Napoleon had a great admiration for England. The English have the wrong idea: he didn’t hate them, he was just a military man, and the French interests were different to the English.”

“It seems that vanity, too, may have played a role,” adds Osenat with a wry smile, “Napoleon was always worried about his image. Though at the time he was stranded on the South Atlantic Ocean island, he probably still cared about what people thought, so he wanted to read what was said about him in the English press”.

Whatever the reason and despite Napoleon’s best efforts, the letter shows he knew he still had some way to go in mastering the language.