For teaching writing, she certainly adopted his methods: “When children can read a little, you should make a sort of play for them by making them form letters.... Children have a natural inclination to draw figures on paper, and, with the least little bit of help and direction, they will learn to form letters, and gradually accustom themselves to write. Then you will say to them: Write me a little note, or send such and such a piece of news to your brother, or your cousin.” We know that Madame de Maintenon herself adopted this method with one of her first pupils, the Duke of Maine. When he was only five years old she told him one day to write a letter to the King. “Oh! but I don’t know how to write a letter,” said the little chap. “Have you nothing in your heart you would like to tell him?” “I am very sorry he has gone away,” says the little Duke, readily. “Very well, write that down; nothing could be better. What else?” “Well, I shall be very, very glad when he comes back.” “There’s your letter written,” says Madame. “All you have to do is to write it down simply as you think it, and, if you think amiss, we shall correct you.” It is in this way, as she told the “Bleues” one day she came to correct their letters for them, that she taught Monsieur de Maine, “and you know,” she said, “what beautiful letters he writes now.” I have not been able to find any indication of how arithmetic was taught at Saint-Cyr—but its importance for girls had been too strongly insisted on by Fénélon for it to be neglected. “Girls,” he says, “should know the four rules—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. You should practice them in these rules by giving them accounts to make up. Many people find this task a great burden, but if one is accustomed to it from childhood, and learns to avail oneself of the help of the rules, to deal quickly with the most complicated accounts, one loses this distaste.” Very often, as he points out, good and economical housekeeping depends on the housekeeper’s exactitude in keeping accounts. Grammar was taught at Saint-Cyr in the spirit of the “Education des Filles” by practice in correct writing and speaking, rather than by rule, “as boys study their Latin Grammar.” Again and again the importance of speaking “good French” is insisted upon—and we all know the models that were given them. It was to teach her little girls to speak the purest and best French that Madame de Maintenon had them trained to act some of the best plays of Corneille and Racine. There came a day when these young people “played ‘Andromaque’ so well that they would never play it again—neither it, nor any other of your pieces,” Madame writes to Racine. She did not keep her word, fortunately for us, for they were destined to play “Esther.” PART II.