priation, Rents and Fines; and she should know something of the moral obligations of a landowner, how to prevent the violence and chicanery so common in the country, should found little schools, provide food for the starving and care for the sick, and, above all things, ensure for all her dependants a solid instruction and Christian control.1 Thus Fénelon had done much, if he had not done all. He stood far ahead of all other contemporary reformers, above Port Royal in his humanity, in his insistence on the social duties, as well of education as religion, above Mme. de Maintenon in his adaptiveness, in his wish to soften down the outlines of a training rigorously practical and domestic, by some little touch of wider, more artistic culture. Nor need he fear competition with a later world. "When we turn to modern literature from Fénelon's pages," says Mr Morley, "who does not feel that the world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence had passed out from our hearts ? " 2 Gaps there are, and contradictions and extravagances. Fénelon is open to the charge, so often brought against the Jansenists, of first teaching girls to think for themselves, and then forbidding them to express their thoughts. We might have wished his intellectual programme a little broader. Thirty years later, within his own lifetime, his correspondent and admirer, Mme. de Lambert, was already chafing at its narrowness; unless their minds were better stocked with serious knowledge, girls, she feared, would find their way back to the 'delicious poison of Society.' it was long before another disciple, Mme. de Rémusat, broadened his timid conception of a house-wife, busied with much serving in the background, into the worthier ideal of a wife, whose glory it was to be the mother and the consort of a citizen, ready, though herself holding no cards in the game of life, to sit as a counsellor beside the players, to 2 Rousseau, ii. p. 249. 1 ch. xii. p. 594. Sallwürk, p. 98. And share in their victories, and console their defeats.1 Yet it was from the Education of Girls that these later reformers started; from Fénelon they learned to turn "all their knowledge into character, all their wisdom into virtue." 2 1 Sallwürk, p. 351. 2 Mme. de Lambert, qu. Gréard, Introduction, p. liii. THE CHAPTER V THE COURT PRECEPTORATE Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum HE Education of Girls was destined to bring its author something more than literary glories. On the 20th of August, 1689, the Duke of Beauvilliers was gazetted Governor to the little Duke of Burgundy, eldest son of the Dauphin, and the Abbé de Fénelon, on Beauvilliers' recommendation, was appointed his Preceptor. On the following day Mme. de Sévigné wrote that the King had made three men out of one Duke,1 which was quite as it should be— St Louis could not have made a better choice. This Abbé de Fénelon too was a man of rare merit for intelligence, knowledge and piety. The appointment was received with general satisfaction. Louis the Great, it was said, had once more outshone all earlier monarchs, and shown himself wiser than Philip of Macedon when he appointed Aristotle tutor to his son.2 Bossuet was overjoyed at the good fortune of Church and State, and regretted only that the Marquis de Fénelon had not lived to see the elevation of a merit which hid itself with so much care. But M. Tronson, the wise old tutor from St Sulpice, wrote that his joy was mixed with fear; he was afraid lest prudence and charity should reconcile his old pupil only too easily to the ways of a world where the Gospel was but little known.* 1 In allusion to Beauvilliers' three offices, Governor, First Gentleman of the Chamber, and sinecure President of the Council of Finance. 2 Proyart, Vie du Dauphin, Père de Louis XV., i. p. 22. 3 Fén. Wks., vii. p. 497. • Ibid. p. 498. |