As I have said, the primary idea was Madame de Maintenon’s, and it developed successively from a small start at Rueil (1682) with sixty pupils, through Noisy with its one hundred and twenty-four, to stately Saint-Cyr with its projected five hundred. Herself a daughter of the class of smaller landed gentry, she had experienced in her own person all the sorrows and bitterness, all the temptations and dangers to which these poor little sisters of her order must inevitably be exposed—and her thought was to gather as many of them as possible into shelter from them. With the generous means put at her disposition she reckoned that she could provide for five hundred young girls, up to the age of fifteen. But—and it was the statesmanship of the King that raised the point—would there really be very much gained by keeping the girls only until their fifteenth year, and then sending them back to their families with nothing but a half-finished education to their credit? Would it not be better to keep them in Saint-Cyr until they were twenty, and their education complete? With an education such as was planned for them, and a small dowry to supplement the fortune it represented, these girls would find no difficulty in securing suitable “partis,” or being received into convents. Madame de Maintenon perceived that this course would be much better, and she willingly agreed to have the original number of five hundred pupils reduced to two hundred and fifty. For, as she plainly saw, it was less a question of gathering in the greatest number of girls possible, than of conferring a permanent benefit on the whole kingdom, “by making the foundation a source of pious instruction for it.” Saint-Cyr was to be the leaven, which, hidden in “three measures of meal” (being the whole of France), was “to leaven the whole.” Every girl who left Saint-Cyr, after her thirteen years’ training in all Christian and womanly virtues and accomplishments, was to be a centre of education and enlightenment for all those with whom she should come in contact. In her was to come to life that picture of the Christian Gentlewoman which Fénélon has painted in immortal colours, and which M. Octave Gréard has hung in its true place in his gallery of women:—