The needlework lesson which followed the “Instruction” was considered among the most important of the day’s programme. “Try to give the girls a taste for work,” is a recommendation which is always recurring in Madame de Maintenon’s letters. Nor was it only for its direct practical application that she valued it for her girls. She wanted them, it is true, to be able to turn their hands to anything: “to pass from new to old, from fine to coarse, from dresses to underwear, caps and coifs.” But she knew, long before Lady Henry Somerset, the extraordinary comfort there is in the use of the hands. In a wonderfully suggestive article by Maude Egerton King in the “Vineyard,” Lady Henry Somerset’s discovery is recorded: “Who has not heard of Lady Henry Somerset and the help she has discovered for poor women drunkards in the use of their hands? She tells us how domestic grief brings desire for forgetting, and how this is most easily bought in poisonous drink—poor substitute, indeed, for the keen interest of handwork and the consolation found in its conquest of things.” “There was comfort in carding the wool, solace in the spinning-wheel, decision in the exacting shuttle as it flew to escape the batten and reed.” Madame de Maintenon had tasted in many hours of spirit weariness the solace of the busy hand: “nothing is more necessary for our sex than the love of work; it calms the passions, it occupies the mind, and filling up the time pleasantly, leaves one no leisure for evil thoughts. What is a woman to do who cannot bear to stay at home, or find pleasure in her household employments, or interest in a bit of needlework. What can she do but seek it at the theatre, or the card-table?” No wonder that next to piety, and reason, she values needlework as an instrument of education. There is a singing lesson yet to be gone through, and a catechism lesson, before the supper and recreation, night prayers and examination of conscience which end the day at Saint-Cyr. Whether the girls have a voice or not, she likes them to join the singing-class. “Even if they cannot sing, they will know something about it, and take pleasure in it,” she tells the “Vertes” on one occasion, and goes on to impress them with the necessity of letting slip no opportunity of learning anything likely to be useful. “Look at me,” she says, “who found no talent so useful at Court as to be able to do hair well!”