ottes,
Miramiones, Manettes du Tiers Ordre, and many others. Elsewhere, the
curate of the parish was obliged through a parish regulation to teach
himself, or to see that his vicar taught. A very large number of
factories or of communes had received legacies for maintaining a school;
the instructor often enjoyed, through an endowment, a metayer farm or a
piece of ground; he was generally provided with a lodging; if he was a
layman he was exempt, besides, from the most onerous taxes; as sexton,
beadle, chorister or bell-ringer, he had small perquisites; finally,
he was paid for each child four or five sous[3156] a month; sometimes,
especially in poor districts, he taught only from All Saints' day down
to the spring, and followed another occupation during the summer. In
short, his salary and his comfort were about those of a rural vicar or
of a suitably paid curate.

Higher education (education secondaire) was provided for in the same
manner, and still better by local and private enterprise. More than one
hundred and eight establishments furnished it completely, and more than
four hundred and fifty-four partially.[3157] Like the others, and
not less liberally than the smaller schools, these were supported
by endowments, some of which were very ample and even magnificent;
a certain upper school in the provinces, Rodez,[3158] possessed
twenty-seven thousand livres income, and one in Paris, Louis-le-Grand,
an income of four hundred and fifty thousand livres, each of these,
large or small, having its own distinct endowment, in real property,
lands and houses, and in revenues on privileges derived from the
hotel-de-ville, the octroi and from transportation lines.--And, in
each of them, the scholarships, or half-scholarships, were numerous-six
hundred alone in Louis-le-Grand. In total, out of the seventy-two
thousand scholars in the kingdom, there were forty thousand for whom a
high-school education was gratuitous or half-gratuitous; nowadays, it is
less than five thousand out of seventy-nine thousand.[3159] The reason
why is that, before 1789, the revenues were not only large, but
the expenses were small. The salary of a head-master, teacher, or
assistant-teacher was not large, say four hundred and fifty, six
hundred, nine hundred, or twelve hundred livres per annum at most, just
enough for a single man to live on; in effect, most of the teachers were
priests or monks, Benedictines, regular canons, Oratorians, the latter
alone