I happened to retain a love-letter addressed
to a girl who was supposed to be  married to
the Comte de Parcaire, by a loving Comte de
Villeprès—who was a girl, aged fourteen
years and a half. "Urgent!" was written
under the address, and thus it runs: "My
very tender Cousin,—I have just read your
letter and many tears have wetted my visage
in thinking of what you endure." (At the
hands, of course, of her husband). "Oh, yes,
my adorable friend, I feel but too sharply
your pains, I weep over them with you.
Our situation is very distressing to me I
assure you, but detained here by indispensable
duties. Oh, why, why cannot I fly
to your side" . . . and so on, it runs
on "to become a very fervid declaration
of love, and ends thus—"Adieu,
most charming of women. Believe in the
love, constant and sincere, of him who lives
and breathes but for you. Your devoted
servant and unworthy slave, De Villeprès."

There was one characterin our school which
never will be found wanting in any French
establishment of the same kind: namely, the
spy. She was a little, thin, red-nosed woman,
troubled all through the year with chilblains, a
miserable-looking creature, literally one of the
creeping things of the earth. I think of her
now with pity; I thought of her at school
with loathing. She was not mistress and not
servant,—as we supposed, a poor relation of
Madame Grondet. She it was who admonished
us of hours that we would gladly have
forgotten. She it was who sent us to our
practising; who carried the big keys,—not
hanging in a bunch, lest they might rattle
and let us know that she was stepping
by, but in her hands where they were noiseless.
She it was who had the power of the keys to lock
us up. She it was who saw the girl, husband,
wife, or lover, slipping notes under doors, and
picked them from under such doors and read
them. She it was who rapped at the window
if a young lady took up her geography when
she ought to have been practising her scales.
She it was who glided from behind trees in
the garden, if any girl indulged, by chance,
in special execration of Madame Grondet, the
priest, or the music-master—she,
Mademoiselle Partange de Merville, walking
leisurely within earshot, with her hands
behind her, holding open, over the small of her
back, a manual of prayers.

Her tongue was against us all, and all our
tongues were against her; and French girls
when they suspect eavesdropping can sting
the listener with biting, cruel words,—for
they are quick girls—only too quick, and
clever, and amusing. They are not often to
be led to see the earnest side of anything
that has a trivial side. They have mercy
upon nothing and upon nobody except their
parents. Father and mother they regard
universally, I think, with strong and
reverent affection. And yet they are very
religious; their ideas of what they are
taught to regard as religious right and wrong
are sharply denned; of moral right and
wrong, their notions always seemed to me to
be extremely vague.

Friday was the religious instruction day at
Madame Grondet's. The priest then came
for an hour and a half to teach the French
girls their prayers and their duties. At the
same time the English mistress was supposed
to be engaged in the same way with us
Protestants; but she preferred generally to
repeat to us from memory some novels.
She was, for that reason, highly popular
among those over whom, she was set in
charge. There were never any arguments
about religion between Protestants and
Catholics, beyond an occasional light sneer
hazarded. Once, I remember, on the
question having been put to M. Juton
whether Shakspeare was equal to Racine, he,
merely out of kindness to the weaker party,
answered, "Yes, he was." One of the girls
turned to me and said, "Well, then,
Protestants were not Christians"—as if that
settled the question for ever in Racine's
favour—but this was all. The other girls
were content, some with expressing detestation
of the English, and others with declaring
that there were no cows and no eggs in
England. The Catholic girls were more
scrupulous than the Protestants in their devotions.
They repeated long prayers every evening
with immense rapidity. They confessed, and
received the sacrament three or four times in
the year; and with them this is a ceremony
of the greatest moment. I used sometimes
to see them writing their confessions. When
this duty was to be done, they were all
collected in their class-rooms, with the
doors closed. A prayer having been read,
they sat some time in deep meditation, with
their faces buried in their hands; after that,
they commenced a wild scribbling and
scratching of pens. I could easily have
looked over any one of them writing if I had
been impertinently curious, although they
were all fortified with walls of books set up
on edge around them. Their character was
to be gathered in ten minutes. One girl
would whisper to another, "Louise, Louise,
do you remember when I told Madame that
lie about my writing-book?" Another
would then ask, perhaps, "Marie, when was
it I threw the soup under the table?" And
another would cry aloud, "Adele, can you
tell me when it was that I tried to dance the
can-can?"

Everything was recorded, even to all the
words of ridicule (and they were many)
which had been uttered against the very
priest to whom they were repeated. He
must have been mightily amused sometimes.
I was told that he did not care half so much
about untruth as about absence from mass;
and, indeed, falsehoods were told in the
school with the perfect indifference that
belongs to one's doing of all matters of