er reason that she was
sent.

On the same principle, she went to school at Reading soon after the
Southampton experience. 'Not,' we are told, 'because she was thought old
enough to profit much by the instruction there imparted, but because she
would have been miserable without her sister'; her mother, in fact,
observing that 'if Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane
would insist on sharing her fate.'

The school chosen was a famous one in its day--namely, the Abbey School
in the Forbury at Reading, kept by a Mrs. Latournelle, an Englishwoman
married to a Frenchman. Miss Butt, afterwards Mrs. Sherwood, who went to
the same school in 1790, says in her Autobiography[19] that Mrs.
Latournelle never could speak a word of French; indeed, she describes
her as 'a person of the old school, a stout woman, hardly under seventy,
but very active, although she had a cork leg. . . . She was only fit for
giving out clothes for the wash, and mending them, making tea, ordering
dinner, and in fact doing the work of a housekeeper.'

But in Mrs. Sherwood's time she had a capable assistant in Madame St.
Quentin, an Englishwoman, married to the son of a nobleman in Alsace,
who in troubled times had been glad to accept the position of French
teacher at Reading Grammar School under Dr. Valpy. Mrs. Sherwood says
that the St. Quentins so entirely raised the credit of the seminary that
when she went there it contained above sixty pupils. The history of the
school did not end with Reading, for the St. Quentins afterwards
removed to 22 Hans Place, where they had under their charge Mary Russell
Mitford. Still later, after the fall of Napoleon, the St. Quentins moved
to Paris, together with Miss Rowden, who had long been the mainstay of
the school. It was while the school was here that it received Fanny
Kemble among its pupils.[20]

Mrs. Sherwood tells us that the school-house at Reading, 'or rather the
abbey itself, was exceedingly interesting, . . . the ancient building . . .
consisted of a gateway with rooms above, and on each side of it a vast
staircase, of which the balustrades had originally been gilt. . . . The
best part of the house was encompassed by a beautiful, old-fashioned
garden, where the young ladies were allowed to wander under tall trees
in hot summer evenings.'

Discipline was not severe, for the same lady informs us: 'The liberty
which the first class had was so great that if we attended our tutor in
his study f