rably well,
and to whom the title of valet-de-chambre was given to insure greater
consideration. They gave me the most fashionable teachers besides; but
M. Roch (which was my mentor's name) was not qualified to arrange their
lessons, or to qualify me to benefit by them. I was, moreover, like
all the children of my age and of my station, dressed in the handsomest
clothes to go out, and naked and dying with hunger in the house,"[2235]
and not through unkindness, but through household oversight,
dissipation, and disorder, attention being given to things elsewhere.
One might easily count the fathers who, like the Marshal de Belle-Isle,
brought up their sons under their own eyes, and themselves attended to
their education methodically, strictly, and with tenderness. As to the
girls, they were placed in convents; relieved from this care, their
parents only enjoy the greater freedom. Even when they retain charge
of them they are scarcely more of a burden to them. Little Felicite de
Saint-Aubin[2236] sees her parents "only on their waking up and at meal
times." Their day is wholly taken up; the mother is making or receiving
visits; the father is in his laboratory or engaged in hunting. Up to
seven years of age the child passes her time with chambermaids who teach
her only a little catechism, "with an infinite number of ghost stories."
About this time she is taken care of; but in a way which well portrays
the epoch. The Marquise, her mother, the author of mythological and
pastoral operas, has a theater built in the chateau; a great crowd of
company resorts to it from Bourbon-Lancy and Moulins; after rehearsing
twelve weeks the little girl, with a quiver of arrows and blue wings,
plays the part of Cupid, and the costume is so becoming she is allowed
to wear it in common during the entire day for nine months. To finish
the business they send for a dancing-fencing master, and, still wearing
the Cupid costume, she takes lessons in fencing and in deportment. "The
entire winter is devoted to playing comedy and tragedy." Sent out of
the room after dinner, she is brought in again only to play on the
harpsichord or to declaim the monologue of Alzire before a numerous
assembly. Undoubtedly such extravagances are not customary; but the
spirit of education is everywhere the same; that is to say, in the eyes
of parents there is but one intelligible and rational existence, that
of society, even for children, and the attentions bestowed on these