thy Revolutionists of 1793, at the same time that they gave a
public ball in the Church of Notre-Dame in honour of the Tree of
Liberty, which the young girls of the place were expected to attend 'in
dresses of white, symbolic of their innocence, and adorned only with
their virtues!'

Besides this public college, Chauny, before the beneficent epoch of the
Revolution, possessed a public school in each parish of the town. The
schoolmaster, besides his regular scholars, who paid for their
education, was expected to receive and educate eight poor children
nominated by the mayor and sworn magistrates. For this he received,
under Louis XIV., in 1706, forty setiers of wheat and fifty livres in
money. It is interesting, also, to learn that the principal of the
public college, when he happened to be a layman, received a salary,
under Louis XIV., of 400 livres in addition to his dwelling-house. When
he was a priest he received only 300 livres, but he might also receive
172 livres more as chaplain of the Hotel-Dieu. The well-to-do citizens
who sent their children to the college paid for each child forty sols a
year.

When law and order had been re-established by Napoleon in France, two
citizens of Chauny, Carra and Dumoulin, in December 1802, got permission
to re-open the college, which the Revolution had closed. It has never
recovered its former importance however, and Chauny now possesses only a
communal school, I am told, and two religious or free schools, besides
the establishments maintained by the Company of St.-Gobain. One
educational foundation of the _ancien regime_, however, still survives,
in the bursaries of the Abbe Bouzier.

Antoine Bouzier d'Estouilly, priest, abbot of Notre-Dame-les-Ardres,
doctor in science, doctor of the Sorbonne, canon and ecolatre of the
collegiale of St.-Quentin, was a noble as well as a priest. He founded,
on October 10, 1713, a fund for endowing two poor boys with the funds
necessary to enable them, in his own words, 'to serve the Church as
ecclesiastics, or the public in civil functions.' This phraseology is
worth noting by people who are tempted to believe the nonsense current
in our day to the effect that 'almost everything we know as modern
civilisation in connection with institutions of a philanthropic sort has
taken shape within the last hundred years, and is due to the influence
of the Revolution of 1789 in France.'

Nothing can be wider of the truth than this. On the contrary, the