CHAPTER V
SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
Education in France has neither the moral nor social value it has in England. In the first place, public-school life has nothing like the importance it has with us, where a university education almost suffices to make a gentleman of a young man, for, whatever his origin may be, the Oxonian is pretty sure to plume himself on the prestige of his training. In France there is no equivalent for this rank. Where a man has been educated is of no consequence to him in after life. While he is at school, his parents, if they happen to be nobles, or snobs who desire to pass for nobles, or as belonging to a set bien pensant, like to be able to say that their son is at the school of Vaugirard, Madrid, La Poste, or at the Marists. This fact suffices to pose a family with the hall-mark of indisputable correctness. Neither the Jesuits nor the Marists offer such solid advantages in the way of pretension and reputation as the English universities do, but they secure youth from the taint of Republicanism, and Society knows that it can rely on their support when the long and expected coup d’êtat comes off. In certain circles, to be educated Is not the main thing, but not to be mistaken for one of the canaille.
M. Demolins wrote a book, A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons, which made a considerable stir. The author maintains that the violent contrast between the two races starts in the schoolroom, and reveals to us already the deep-seated causes of their differences. The French boy is trained in the suppression of all independence, the discouragement of all initiative. Those brought up in the secular lycées have nothing to remember but unqualified misery. The system is less intolerable for the day-pupils. These come at eight and leave at seven. Each class lasts two hours, and if the boy’s way lies through any of the big gardens, he can enjoy, with other outdoor comrades, many an hour of play. The indoor martyrs are less privileged, for each moment of recreation is as severely guarded as the hours of class. They have stated intervals for play; in the earlier years they are contented with running, but, by-and-by, they crave for more violent and interesting exercise, and when these are denied them, they give up play. Until lately, all violent games were forbidden in the lycées because they were regarded as dangerous, and the college principals are responsible for all accidents that happen in their schools. Not long ago a proviseur was heavily fined because one of the students, in flinging a stone, had accidentally broken a window and hurt another boy’s eye. It is easy enough, under such extraordinary circumstances, to understand the proviseur’s persistent discouragement of rough games. Skating is not allowed, for this, too, is dangerous; and, for the same reason, gymnastics are permitted only once a week, each student going in turn to the gymnasium and staying there for about three minutes. And so in French colleges these blustering years of boyhood know no other variety of pleasure than the treadmill of the courtyard. Backwards and forwards they walk in recreation hours, talking together; and need it be supposed that the words of wisdom are ever on their lips? As I have said, the day-students do not need much pity. They can make the lycée merely a daily accessory of life—a place they go to generally with the intention of wasting their time. Should they have the good-fortune to light upon a first-rate teacher, which is rare, they will get some profit from the hours spent at the lycée. But the indoor student is wretched. He is a dejected being, with none of the distractions of his age—unboyish, unjoyous, watched and watching, prematurely demoralised by his fellow unfortunates, and, like them, the slave of the very worst possible system of education.
CONSECRATED BREAD
Dagnan-Bouveret
M. Demolins complains that the French rely too much on stiff examinations as a test of knowledge, and a French youth writes me on this subject: “We have a great many schools in France; as many as there are professions, since nobody who has not spent two or three years in some sort of school, and undergone innumerable examinations, can hope to do anything. For instance, I have undergone nine examinations, and it is not even over! Naturally, I only refer to necessary examinations. They begin at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Before that period you must have been at a lycée or college. A lycée is a government establishment, and a college belongs to its township. The training is identical, but the college professors are less well paid. Their inferiority to the lycée professors lies in the fact that they have not undergone so many examinations as these, or, perhaps, only have come out of them less successfully. In the lycées and colleges there are two methods—the literary or old method, and the scientific or new one. The old method is general: literature, geography, history, German or English (never both), Latin, Greek, mathematics, every year; in the first years only zoölogy, botany, and geology, and in the last years philosophy. But always the most important thing is Latin. The youth who has gone through the course of philosophy has learnt Latin for seven years, Greek for five years and a half, but, knowing that his Latin will be of no service to him after he has passed his baccalauréat, as soon as he thinks he knows enough for that examination—and he thinks so at an early hour—he flings his Latin books at the head of his professor or recklessly goes to sleep upon them, if he be working merely for place as a bureaucrat; and I, for one, have not the heart to blame him. Unfortunately, it is the same thing for German, and English, and everything else. Amongst a hundred young men in the philosophy class, not more than two will understand or speak German, and never more than one will speak English. Amongst a hundred French youths speaking German or English you will find that ninety-nine have spent some years in Germany or England; the hundredth is a phenomenon. Besides, it is fashionable to-day in France not to know a word of a foreign tongue. The scientific method is less general than the literary method. It comprises chiefly sciences and modern languages—German, English, Spanish, and Italian. It is certainly more serious than the other. There is a baccalauréat, too, but unlike the literary baccalauréat, which is an aim, the scientific baccalauréat is only the means of arriving at an aim. The literary baccalauréat leads to nothing, or to the law school, which is almost the same thing, for, speaking generally, the students have no other object than the avoidance of the three years’ military service.” The scientific baccalauréat leads to the Polytechnique school, to St. Cyr, or to the school of medicine, but those who wish to become officers or doctors do not leave the lycée after the baccalauréat, and some stay on three or four years longer. The externes, that is, those who go to the lycées only for the classes, are well off, for these find their pleasures and moral training where they should be found, at home and with comrades of their own choosing. But the demi-pensionnaires are nearly as unfortunate as the internes, as these are condemned to most of the prison tortures of one of the worst gifts the genius of Napoleon gave to the land he so basely used. “Everyone knows well enough our dreadful college,” writes M. Demolins, “with its much too long classes and studies, its recreations far too short and without exercise, its prison walks, a monotonous going and coming between high, heart-breaking walls, and then every Sunday and Thursday the military promenade in rank, the exercise of aged men and not of youth.”
For this reason you will never hear a French boy speak with any kindly sentiment of his school-days. Napoleon, who invented the horrid system, was a creature absolutely destitute of kindness or humanity. He wanted more destructive machines, willing for the chance of what is euphemistically called “glory.” Virile independence in boyhood was just the very last thing a man like Napoleon could be expected to value. An English schoolboy will cheerfully go to the wars by force of his own good-will, but he will not be whipped thither by Government whether he wills it or not. And you would never find him submitting, as his French brother does, with patience and resignation to a scholastic system which atrophies his body and unduly heats his brain. The instincts of his race must be considered, and these make for energy, action, and independence.
From the lycée to French fiction is a big jump, and at first blush neither seems to have any connection with the other, yet I do not hesitate to blame the unhealthy, enervating, and unmanly training of the former for many of the lamentable scandals of the latter. English boys are not saintly, but they are certainly admitted, by those who have had opportunities of judging both, to be cleaner-minded, with a more vigorous and healthy outlook, than French lads. The same difference exists between French and English girls. To begin with, the French are naturally less frank and truthful; and where there is practised dissimulation it is not easy to answer for the moral and mental cleanliness of the young. These young fellows, whose sole distraction from excessive and futile mental labour has been the daily promenade in the courtyard, who have been the recipients of insidious confidences and unhealthy talk, leave school blighted and perverted. We need not ask ourselves what, in nine cases out of ten, follows, the tenth being the admirable youth who takes himself and his future responsibilities seriously, who loves knowledge with the disinterestedness and capacity for sacrifice to it that a Frenchman of the best kind is capable of. But these others, unsoundly bred, without an outlet for the barbarous spirits of the youthful male,—what will be their experiences? Denied exercise, they cannot even fall back upon innocent flirtation with girls of their own age, for this is not possible in France. And so these newly emancipated citizens straightway wander off in search of romance into a world that it would have been wise and right to keep them out of, and whatever freshness the grisette may leave them can speedily be lost in the still more destructive hands of an unprincipled married woman. It is the shabby and monotonous love-affairs of this uninteresting rake, his steady degradation, that procure renown for the popular romances; to paint him and his dreary deceptions and drearier outrages on decent feeling a whole school of novelists exists and thrives, and the great desire of the newly married bride, never before permitted to read the fiction of her own land, is to learn what life is through his unmanly and ignoble adventures. Had the boy been trained differently he would have had another ideal, and there would have been some place for noble aspirations and generous sentiment in a heart not yet hardened by squalid cynicism.
THE REFECTORY
A. Bouvin
The great defect of the lycée system is its impersonality. The Republican professors should borrow a hint from their more successful ecclesiastical rivals, the Marists and Jesuits, and hold their pupils by the influence of personal relations, win them by the direct exercise of moral guidance. There are two courses to adopt in training youth—that followed by the priesthood, which is insidious, and which regards them not as so many young men to be taught how to live and conduct themselves as honourable men, but as so many souls to be saved in a world to come. The second is the British method, the object of which is to make men of boys, to teach them to think and act for themselves, to be self-sufficing, self-supporting, to know how a gentleman should act in all circumstances, and, should nature have denied him intelligence, to prove himself, in the depths of his stupidity, at least a “gentlemanly” ass. I give my preference, I will own, to the British system, like M. Demolins, but what I should prefer to it even would be a third, not yet practised, by which youth might profit by the best in the English course of training and the best in the French; that is to say, a combination of the superior French intellectual education and the superior English moral training. If there were nothing between a well-brought-up fool and an intellectual cad, then, in Heaven’s name, give us nothing but the sympathetic fool; but how much better if we could have the well-bred “intellectual” too! Some years ago a Greek minister, about to send his son to a public school either in France or England, did me the honour to take me for a wise and intelligent person,—which I have no pretension to be,—and asked my advice on the question of a choice of countries. I told him he would have to decide between knowledge and education. If he wished his son to be brought up in a healthy, virile fashion, taught to conduct himself on the lines of the British ideal, which for all practical purposes is about as fine a one as is to be found, though it, too, has limitations it were well to recognise and acknowledge—then let it be England, and Oxford or Cambridge. If, on the other hand, he wished to see his son a proficient scholar, well grounded in the classics, intellectually trained in the course of a couple of miserable years, his brain overworked in the depressing atmosphere of a prison, then let the French lycée be his choice. The minister decided for knowledge; and I believe his son returned to Athens a very brilliant young fellow, and all that a statesman could desire his son to be. He would have learnt less in England, but certainly he would have had a pleasanter time; and to me it always seems that our real education only begins when we have left off compulsory learning; that what we teach ourselves and not what others teach us is of consequence. A duffer will always be a duffer, however much you may stuff his head; the main thing is that he should be an honest duffer. The brilliant boy will never fail to light upon food for his brains wherever he may find himself.
The misfortune is that everything in France leads to politics, and hence we have had the disgraceful sight of students in revolt against their professor, hissing and pelting him because elsewhere he had chosen to express political views to which these wise and learned young gentlemen objected, or because his politics were not those of their parents. The class of an eminent professor at Bordeaux was deserted, and stones were flung at him in the street by his pupils, for a graceful and manly reference to the cause of the death of the dean of his university, whose funeral oration he was called upon to pronounce. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to acquire a beneficial influence as a professor, for personal prestige, the value of character—which is the highest thing we can value in a teacher—are of no account in a land where, generally speaking, a man is loved or hated, not for the life he leads, the acts he commits, the duties he leaves unfulfilled, but solely for the political side he takes. In modern France character is nothing; politics everything. What students first demand is that their professors shall be on the side approved of by this immature class. After that they will condescend to listen to them. But the notion of being guided and influenced by the older mind, the riper judgment, does not enter their heads. The only professors who know how to grip and mark for life these malleable natures are the Jesuits. When Jesuit boys break away from their keepers, the Jesuits have no bitterer enemies. What intelligent Protestant has ever given us arguments so powerful and damning against Jesuit training as those two novels by their old pupils, Le Scorpion of Marcel Prévost, and L’Empreinte by Estaunié? L’Empreinte (The Stamp) is much the greater study of Jesuitism of the two. Here you see a young, pliable nature for ever caught in its meshes, not brutalised or overtly captured, but insidiously demoralised, directed unconsciously into the path of dissimulation and unsleeping watchfulness, out of which the manliest efforts he makes afterwards, when he has shaken off its vice-like grasp of his individuality, never carry him. Here you understand, as no melodramatic stories of Sue or Dumas could make you understand, the shuddering intensity of moral hold; the implacable, mild pursuit; the potency and success of the Jesuits all the world over. It is a mistake to associate this self-rooted dislike of the Jesuits with bigoted Protestantism or blatant atheism. Read the exquisite stories of Ferdinand Fabre, studies by a sincere Catholic of Catholic life, which bear upon the underhand persecution of excellent, well-meaning country priests by what are called the Congregationalists, the Black Army, the Jesuits chiefly. Read that delightful study of Cévennes life under the Restoration, Jacquou le Croquant, by Eugene Le Roy, and see how a good French Catholic, who loves and reveres the saintly village curate, can loathe his enemies, the Jesuits. Here, too, as in Ferdinand Fabre’s Mon Oncle Celestin, a beautiful soul, a kind of early Christian,—who lives only to do good around him, whose life is one long lesson of love, of sacrifice, and abnegation,—is hounded out of the priesthood, falsely accused, horribly slandered, and excommunicated; and all by the secret manœuvres of the Jesuits, because he accepted the Republic, deeming it more the priest’s duty to concern himself with the private interests and sorrows and trials of his flock than to dabble in politics; more occupied in spreading the evangelical precept, “Love one another,” than in maintaining the power of the Church. I count among my friends Jesuits whom I like and appreciate, for whose private character I have the highest possible esteem, whom I have found in all respects amiable, educated gentlemen, full of gaiety and charm, and of a sympathetic address rarely to be met with in any other class of men. But of the order and its principles, based upon knowledge, I feel nothing but dislike. The Jesuits in China, in South America, have, I understand, and willingly believe, done good work. We know that they are brave, and can sacrifice their lives in the cause of their religion. I know from personal experience that they can be the most charming and sympathetic of men. But can anyone point out the good they have done in Europe? What are their charities? What are their good deeds? What noble use do they make of their extraordinary worldly influence? For, wherever they establish themselves, it is the world of fashion, and not the poor, they gather round them. When they open schools, it is for the rich, for the powerful, for the aristocrats of the land. If you pass their doors, it is carriages you will see there; well-dressed ladies and men of fashion you will find on their steps, and not the outcast, the abandoned wife and children, miserable, poor, and withered humanity. The order is essentially a political and not a Christian order, established to work upon the wealthy, and to obtain their suffrages.
In proof of this statement I need only quote a common phrase among middle-class Catholics, “If you are not rich or clever, never go near the Jesuits.” They appreciate brains as much as money, for they can make good use of both, but you will never hear their praises sung by the poor, the “little” class, useful neither socially nor politically, through whom they cannot hope to advance their order and secure it prestige. The order was founded by an aristocrat and a soldier. Aristocratic it has ever since remained in its sympathies; and the moral of the Dreyfus affair has given us a good notion of the military principles of honour, justice, and truth which modern France owes to its training. For assuredly it is the Jesuits who have exercised a wider influence upon the educational forces of France than any other society; it is they who are the deadliest enemy of the Republic; and as they hold all the forts of tradition, aristocratic, fashionable, and military, France may be said to be in their hands. It is to be hoped that when posterity comes to judge the recent crisis through which France has passed it will not spare a society which deserves ill at the hands of humanity.
One of the things for which the Jesuits are to be praised or blamed, according as you may view the proceeding, is the extraordinary way they follow their pupil out into the world and through the various phases of his career. If he forsakes them, as the harassed hero of L’Empreinte does, an invisible hand arrests his course at every step. He is the victim of the implacable pursuit of those who trained him, while he can never throw off the habit of dissimulation acquired in his impressionable youth. Let him go where he will, let him be what he will, the moral of M. Estaunié’s masterly study is that he is stamped with the imperishable stamp of Jesuitism. He cannot be frank and straightforward, even with a violent effort, and he knows that, whatever he does, he is being watched and followed. L’Empreinte is a book that should be given to every newly married pair, in the hope of making them think twice when their son is born, before deciding to have him brought up by the Jesuits. Since France is, on the whole, a Catholic country, it would be unfair to the large majority of the race to attempt to suppress the seminaries, and prevent French boys from being trained by priests. If the professors are laymen, with a tolerably free hand, there is no reason why the principals should not be ecclesiastics. A good priest can do no harm anywhere, if only he will abstain from politics and sedition. Indeed, if he thought a little more of rigid truthfulness, and recognised the value of sports in a boy’s training, I should be disposed to regard him as an excellent college principal, for we may be sure that his influence will be directed against vice of every kind. Unfortunately, the ecclesiastical temperament tends to undue interference and espionage, for which the habits of the confessional are mainly responsible. In these novels by Jesuit pupils in revolt, the abuses of the confessional in the training of boys are clearly indicated, and though these abuses are considerably diminished in the case of secular priests, I still have no faith in the discretion of the good Fathers of Stanislas.
When I was present at the distribution of prizes at the Sorbonne, a very imposing spectacle, the display of Stanislas was that of a charming, well-bred group of French lads, but behind each I saw the spectre of dissimulation, the insidious suggestion of the “priestly Father,” and the glory of the Church to the detriment of the State, the significant, inalterable law of Catholicity, that the triumph of good is the justification of evil, and that the law of Christ is less important than the maintenance of sacerdotal prestige and power. I looked attentively at those boys, and asked myself what the value of such training could be for them. For the priests who have educated them, they represent so many prized instruments against the Republic, and possibly so many future souls in paradise. But they themselves? When the present fashionable craze for mere “exterior” Catholicity—which is nothing more than an exasperated revolt against foreign influences, on a level, in the record of modern civilisation, with the outbreak of the Boxers of China—shall have exhausted itself, many of the lads will be mediocre freethinkers; the greater part will be what are euphemistically called “non-practical Catholics,” that is, men who are not expected to go to Mass of a Sunday in the shooting season, because it interferes with their sport; who regard confession as a distraction for women; who allow neither God nor the devil to stand between them and the most shameless vices, but who are married and buried by the ritual of Holy Mother, the Church, and whose friends, after their death, piously contemplate them aloft, wreathed and winged, playing harps and chanting hymns, who in life never listened with pleasure to any but ribald songs and unedifying verse.
I have read attentively a little mémoire of the Stanislas College, relating all that is to be told about its routine and order. A sadder pamphlet in connection with boyhood could not be found anywhere. Not a moment’s liberty, not an hour of honest gaiety; under the eye of the overseer from their up-rising to their down-lying. It is bad enough to think of girls so trained in convents; but as the world expects less initiative, less independence, from women, it matters less for them, though it matters much more than parents believe. But who can expect such an unhealthy system as that of Stanislas to turn out straightforward, manly youths? I will translate some of the laws of the institution, and the reader may judge for himself. If it makes him wish to have been brought up at Stanislas, under the care of the good Marists (priests devoted to the service of Mary), I can only say that I do not envy his taste. To begin with, the system of emulation I regard as disastrous; it invariably opens the door to cheating and lying, to jealousy and ill-will. Pride, sense of duty, affection for their masters, are much higher incentives to study than marks, which imply too much espionage on the part of the masters. Stanislas teaches by the desire of reward and the fear of punishment. Even in the case of very young children I hold that this system is deplorable; in that of youths, who are fencing, riding, studying philosophy and the higher mathematics, I can only qualify it as idiotic. Why should a boy receive a prize for behaving himself decently? The moment you put a premium on good conduct you invite the hypocritical to perfect themselves in the art of duplicity in order to compete for it. What master can honestly pronounce on a boy’s character, and swear that the good boy is quite as good as he looks? The moment you tell him that to appear good is to merit a prize, his goodness ceases to be disinterested, and, therefore, virtuous; and in order not to lose his own prize, won by the assiduous suppression of impulse, of temperamental revelation, of all natural instinct, is he not apt to fall into the approved vice of assisting in the discovery of the faults of his rivals? The only prizes we can accept without moral danger are those awarded for actual work done. These have their pitfalls for character too, but there is not nearly such peril of demoralisation. The conduct and work of pupils are appreciated every week by the number of marks, and rewards and punishments are allotted accordingly. A hundred marks buys an outing. Is not this atrocious? That bad conduct should keep a boy indoors when he might be out with his parents is a recognised form of punishment for ill-behaviour; but that he should have to purchase by marks the right to go out seems to me altogether wrong. Even a boy should have his rights, his heritage of free birth; and to be forced to pay for these upon the judgment of others is an iniquity. Forty-one long pages are devoted to the explanation of this futile, shabby, and spying system of emulation, a kind of artificial moral respiration, in which all apertures for simplicity, frankness, and spontaneity are hermetically sealed.
THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES
Here, now, are the rules of the establishment. Silence is compulsory, except at recreation hours, and then speech is strictly controlled by the president, for, says the pamphlet, “One of the first conditions of the college order is silence; those who are unable to keep silence are running the risk of utter ignorance and worthlessness.” One of the attributes of piety, also enjoined, is found to be “friendship for those who are worthy of it.” I should like the Marists to explain to me what they mean by such an extraordinary assertion. In the first place, who is to pronounce on the kind of person worthy of friendship, least of all a schoolboy? Is the pious boy himself worthy of inspiring the sentiment? Many a pious person is incapable of feeling friendship for anybody. This does not take from his piety. It merely proves that he is charming, or cordial, or good-natured, which many an impious soul may be. And why seek to turn a pleasing young animal into a hateful little prig, asking himself, when he should be playing games and flattening an enemy’s nose, if the boy he projects bestowing his friendship on is worthy or not of it? Let the other boy be a black, a brute, or a beggar, his comrade should be content if he likes him. Friendship can never have a more solid, human, and wholesome basis. When we read this sentence we feel that the little Stanislas prig, with his eyes turned down, and his toes turned out, wants a good kicking. If only one could hope to see his nose bleed! but alas! these are the laws of the recreation ground: “All violent and dangerous games are forbidden, likewise all games that touch upon gambling, and cries, and songs, and whistling, and, in general, all that resembles disorder of any kind. It is forbidden to fling stones, to communicate with pupils of another division, to lie on the ground, to drag one another about, to fight. And the pupils can never leave the recreation-ground without leave.”
If, after that, the reader does not agree with me that it is a fine thing to be a British lad, with his cricket, his football, his occasional black eyes, his surreptitious feeding, his long-drawn accounts with the lemonade and ginger-wine merchant, his chatter, and escapades, I can only advise that misguided individual to send his son with all haste to Stanislas, and let him be turned out in its approved fashion, a first-rate, consummate prig and humbug, a well-mannered, French-speaking young hypocrite, perfected in the art of duplicity and self-repression, who, on the order of the Marist Fathers, only bestows his friendship on those worthy of it—individuals, it is to be hoped, of his own self-conscious, sanctimonious way of thinking. He has been bred to calculate the value of every action and every word, for each leads to punishment or reward. He has never, for five mortal minutes, been permitted to show himself for the young barbarian he is. He is a pious old diplomat, a rascal in posse, a sage in esse, when he ought to be a simple, high-spirited, or dreaming child. Between his spiritual readings, his meditations, his confessions, church services, retreats, and rigid discipline, whose control of every minute only ceases when the poor martyr enters the lovely land of dreams,—where the Marists, if they could, would follow him, to see that imagination played no tricks on their training, and that in that world of vagaries and topsyturvyism he was still the pious, silent, and obedient lad they had formed,—he is not a form of boyhood it is pleasant to contemplate. He is allowed fifteen minutes to dress of a morning, under watch, to see “that he dresses promptly and decently beside his bed,” and out of that there is not much time for ablutions. Possibly, like the kings of France, his washing consists of ten fingers dipped into a basin no larger than a milk-bowl. In class he must make no movement of foot or desk, his mind must not wander, he may not open any other book but the class-book in use, he must not draw, or give himself up to any frivolous occupation—presumably verse-making. If he has need to open his desk, he must only lift the lid half-way, and never lock it, as the prefect visits it once a week. He washes his feet once a week and his body once a month, and in summer bathes twice a week. In the parlour he can be visited only by his parents, or persons duly authorised by his parents, and when he goes home of a Sunday he must be escorted from the college and back by a “person of confidence,” furnished with a signed and dated letter. This person can under no circumstances be accepted if a young man.
Those who have the responsibility of the Stanislas pupil on his outing must observe the precautions exacted by the directors. On going out he receives an entrance ticket, which his parents or guardian must fill up with the details of his day, and this account is verified and stamped on his return to the college. The pupil who returns without an escort is punished for a month. Should he obtain leave on false pretences, he is expelled. He can advance by a day or prolong for a day his winter and Easter vacations, by payment of three thousand marks. His letters to his parents or guardian are not read, but they must bear the signature of these on the envelope to assure their privacy; all the rest of his correspondence is under strict control, and the introduction of a book, not a class one, a pamphlet, or a newspaper, constitutes an infraction of the rules so grave as to merit expulsion. This system of education begins at childhood, when he enters the eleventh class and graduates into the preparatory classes for the Naval School and St. Cyr, when his moustache is beginning to bud and he is still supposed to bestow his friendship on those who are worthy of it. Poor youth! He has learnt everything—from the Catechism to mathematics, from philosophy (of a kind) to fencing, riding, and gymnastics (also of a kind, and warranted never to last longer than half an hour, twice a week)—except simple manliness, independence, and the real philosophy, which will help to carry him decently through the surprises and snares of existence, and help him to meet unaided an emergency. Toss him roughly from his Stanislas bark upon the turbulent sea of experience, and what may you expect from this fatuous, trained young hypocrite? The wave rolls over him, carries him to the bottom, and he comes up all covered with mud. Of course he abuses freedom, a stimulant he has never known, and he speedily converts it into the intoxicant of licence.
It will be seen that the training of boys, whether in French seminaries or in French lycées, is not the most perfect of its kind. There is the careful home-training, too, which is, of course, the best. But here also the shadow of the Church towers over childhood. The boy leaves his nurse’s hands to toddle into those of his ecclesiastical tutor, Monsieur l’Abbé. He attends cours and studies at home, with the priest, and when he attends the classes of a lycée he is duly escorted back and forth, with all imaginable precautions to prevent from getting in his mind what should not be there; and finally he is sent to St. Cyr or Saumur, with the usual results. Gyp has given us an amusing sketch of the innocent little lad of this period in Le Petit Bob, about as black a little rascal as ever breathed, and of the model Jesuit boy, “Monsieur Fred,” an accomplished rake, when he is not supposed to look above the rim of his prayer-book.
And now let us glance at the training of the girls. This is, if possible, more deplorable than that of the boys. But it is an admirable testimony to the natural superiority of the Frenchwoman’s character that even the long-persistent effort to spoil her in early years does not prevent her from turning her liberty, when it comes, to excellent account. The little French girl in her mother’s home is happier, I believe, than any other little girl of the world. No child has such tender, such watchful, such devoted, parents as she. She is enveloped in love and care from her cradle, and her privilege is to hear delightful speech about her. A foreign gouvernante will be engaged to teach her whatever language it is intended she shall speak fluently—German or English. If she is not to go to a convent (and this will be, in her interest, the only intelligent decision) she attends cours like her brother, and the gouvernante is superseded by the certificated governess. A good governess, that is, a cultured and liberal-minded lady, is a priceless blessing, but, unhappily, she is rare. I do not know why the best class of women avoid the mission of training the young, for, in the case of a woman without children of her own to train, it ought to be regarded as an exceptionally noble undertaking. It is not, however; and more’s the pity. Society is to blame, with its inane traditions, and, along with it, the senseless passion for inflicting slight and pain upon those in an inferior position which besets so many women in their own homes. And so, not wishing to be treated as servants, without any proper status or dignity, the superior women, who would make the best governesses, seek more independent and congenial occupation; and the training of girls at home falls into the hands of hopeless mediocrities, who have little knowledge and less manners, whose point of view is squalid and shabby and personal. I have listened to the complaints of many an unhappy governess, and I will own I have always been shocked and sickened by the silly way these women allow their lives to be poisoned by considerations they should have the dignity to ignore. How are young women to acquire a noble influence over their pupils when they are busy lamenting the fact that biscuits at lunch were not offered to them, or other such material and vulgar slights which they usually dwell upon as unendurable? If they have heart enough to love, and brains enough to teach and guide, their pupils, and sufficient independence of character not to let themselves be trampled upon, overworked, or snubbed, of what would they have to complain? Let them raise the tone of their position, and they will get all the respect they need and have a right to. I know Frenchwomen who are grandmothers, who still love and admire the feeble and disabled governesses of their girlhood who have helped to train their children and their grandchildren. But in France the superior woman, who might have made an excellent governess, is apt to enter one of the teaching orders, where, instead of doing the good she was intended to do singly, she helps in the crowd to work evil.
The home education of girls will be referred to in another chapter; here I wish to treat of the other kind,—the conventual training. Speaking from extensive knowledge of it, and of wide personal experience, I do not hesitate to qualify it as the very worst possible. It is bad everywhere, but nowhere is it so bad as in France. Its essential object is the destruction of independence and candour. I do not say that a frank girl will never be met with in a convent, but you will never find her among the privileged ones; she will be one of the black sheep, one of the unpliable, one of those who cannot be utilised to full advantage for the greater glory of God, A. M. D. G.! There never was a more subtle legend invented by man for the pursuit of his own aims under the mantle of self-abnegation.
The convent girl is the creature of her environment. You will know her by the hall-mark of her manners. These will be perfect when she comes out of The Assumption, or any other Parisian convent of fashionable renown. Wealthy converted Jews, of rabid anti-Semitic tendencies, send their daughters to these famous establishments for the knotting of useful social ties. I have known of the children of a great foreign merchant being accepted in one of these centres of aristocratic exclusiveness, on the condition that they concealed the fact that they belonged to the commercial classes, and the result was that the unfortunate children, with the natural ease of their imaginative years, drifted into glorious bragging and lying. There was no objection on the part of their trainers to any exercise of imagination that served to ennoble them; the objection would have been provoked by betrayal of the truth. It will be said that this is an exceptional example perhaps. Not so. The last thing recognised by nuns is the virtue of poverty, the value of the lowly born. This fact is so widely recognised by women who visit convents that they themselves will not conceal from you the importance nuns attach to dress, and their indifference to shabbily attired visitors. I still vividly remember a rebuke addressed to a girl in an Irish convent who had got into a scrape with a companion of inferior social rank. “I am surprised at your choice of companion,” said the nun loftily. “Remember, should you and she encounter outside these walls, you will be in your carriage and she will be on foot, and she may count herself honoured if you are permitted to salute her.” There is no reason why there should not be vulgar-minded women within convent walls as well as within the walls of pomp and fashion, for, alas! vulgarity and snobbishness abound; but it is significant that nuns, of whatever nationality you find them, have a strong predilection for the wealthy and well-born. So, it will be said, have the large majority of people, regarding these as the elect of the earth. Well, if so, let girls, when they come to be women, find this out for themselves. But as children and girls, let not their freedom, their spontaneity, be hampered by such unlovely distinctions. Teach them to love all that is good and pleasant in humanity, and let the daughter of a marchioness at school make friends with the daughter of a grocer, without condescension on one side, or undue humility or concealment on the other. Why should not a school seek rather to be a republic, based upon the lovable and republican principles of Christ’s Christianity? The children of both classes will be the gainers, and each will leave school with a hearty esteem for the other. Relations can terminate here, for there is no reason why school girls should continue to be friends if their parents see any cause for objection to the intimacy; but there is every reason that they should learn to appreciate the good there is to be found in those of a different social rank from theirs—inferior or superior. This is the very last thing they may hope to learn in a fashionable convent, since there are no greater worshippers at the shrine of birth and fortune than nuns. I am aware that the difficulties in the way of maintaining such a free mingling of the classes would assuredly come from the parents. The nobles would be horrified if assurance were withheld of perfect social exclusiveness for their offspring, and still more angry would be the sham nobles, the purse-proud snobs, whose selection of a convent for their daughters depends solely upon its fashionable reputation. It may also be contended that the society of the better classes unfits a girl of the commercial class for her after surroundings. But this fact also is based upon false prejudice. Lift the girl’s moral tone, and she will find something else in the acquirement of good manners than contempt of her equals.
My next and still greater charge against conventual education is the elimination by strict supervision of all sentiment of honour. In France two girls are forbidden to talk in the recreation-ground. When they are seen to do so, instead of being separated in an open fashion, a third is secretly ordered to go and join them in a friendly way, and then return and report the subject of their talk to the nun in charge. Needless to say, only the girls regarded as trustworthy and virtuous are told off for this diplomatic duty. I myself, being a hopelessly black sheep, and, in consequence, excellent material for the exercise of this peculiar form of virtue, was long enough its victim before I grasped the fact, and could not understand how reverend mothers and such exalted personages came to be familiar with all my whispered revolutionary chatter. It would be wonderful if girls so trained should in after life scruple to read letters, to steam them if necessary, to listen at doors, and to betray confidences of every kind. And girls who know no other form of distraction and play than the dull walking up and down the recreation-ground, the nightly trial of round games, where you sit in a large circle on benches, with a string and a button attached to it, which one girl passes to the other through her closed fist, all singing French rondes, such as J’ai perdu le cor de ma clarionette, or Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre, or the glories of Cadet Roussel? And this, remember, for girls of sixteen and seventeen—craving intelligent and exciting pastimes!
How fervently I used to bless the headache or cold that permitted me to slip up to bed after supper, and escape from the evening recreation into the more peopled and interesting solitude of my own thoughts. Things may be better since my day. Tennis, bathing, golf, cricket, and racing may now be admitted as feminine pastimes in those holy establishments where I spent so many miserable and profitless years. I hear that even baths are introduced, and that it is no longer deemed by French nuns an offence against modesty to wash oneself. But I recall a very different state of affairs—a state so curious that my French friends do not like to credit it when I assure them of it. I was fourteen when I was sent to school in France to acquire the tongue of courts and diplomacy. On the first morning that I awoke in the long, white-curtained dormitory, I proceeded to wash and dress myself as I had been taught to wash and dress in English convents. I had deposited my dressing-gown on my bed, and was splashing my neck with water, when, to my astonishment, a nun approached me noiselessly, lifted my dressing-gown from the bed, and holding her shocked glance averted murmured, La pudeur, mon enfant, la pudeur, as she covered my dripping neck in the folds of my dressing-gown. When I clamoured for an explanation, I was told it was not considered decent in France for a young girl to wash her neck. We were worse off than the young gentlemen of Stanislas, whose feet are washed once a week; ours were washed only once a fortnight, and then a cloth was kept over them, lest the sight of our naked feet in the water should lead to the loss of our souls. For the years I was there, nobody, to my knowledge, ever had a bath of any kind. However, this is all changed, I am happy to say. French nuns have had to move with the times and accept the modern institution of baths.
I hope they have also grown to accept the institution of men. When I was at school we were strictly forbidden to lift our eyes to a man’s face. When the old doctor of eighty passed through the courtyard, if any of us happened to be about there was an instant cry of alarm, Baissez les yeux, mesdemoiselles. Il y a du monde. Du monde always meant the wolf in trousers and coat, and we were invited ever to tremble, blush, and lower our eyes in the dreadful creature’s presence. It was a garrison town, and whenever we walked abroad and found officers upon our path nuns would skurry down our black-robed ranks, crying in terrified undertones, Baissez les yeux, mesdemoiselles. Messieurs les officiers vous regardent. Will any one explain to me the mental and moral value of such training? Is it not shocking that innocent girls should be bred in the notion that there is any reason why they should not look men frankly and simply in the face?
