At the Catechism Classes she likes the girls to question one another, but she had no patience with budding casuists, who made difficulties to show their own cleverness. Did she scold the little Duchess of Burgundy who, one day, doing Catechist to the “Bleues,” on being asked, “Where is the Valley of Jehosaphat?” covered her own ignorance by the scorn she poured on the questioner? “That’s a sensible question, indeed, Mademoiselle; and you have great need of knowing it in order to get to Heaven.” I do not think so. With Fénélon (whose precept in this particular was so much better than his practice) she held that women have not the brains for the subtleties of Theology or Philosophy. “Women only know things by halves” (here she repeats Fénélon’s very words), “and the little they know renders them proud, disdainful, talkative, and disgusted with common things.” “I would much prefer to see your girl occupied with your house-steward’s accounts than with the disputes of the Theologians,” Fénélon had said, and Madame de Maintenon (especially after the Quietist troubles, when even the “Rouges” talked of nothing else but “pure love,” “holy indifference,” “simplicity,” and all the other jargon of Madame Guyon’s letters) took the lesson to heart. And now to conclude. In a letter to the “Dames de Saint Louis” of February, 1706, she sums up the whole aim of the education of Saint-Cyr, and nothing gives a more faithful picture of its ideal than her words:— “Let all your instructions, conversations, reprimands, punishments, rewards, relaxations, be employed to make your girls virtuous, pure, modest, discreet, silent, reliable, kind, just, generous, lovers of honour, of good faith and probity, giving pleasure in all that is possible, hurting no one’s feelings, bearing peace everywhere, never repeating aught but what will please and reconcile. Thirteen years are not too long, my dear sisters, to train them up, and form them to so many good things.” Thirteen years are certainly not too long—nor a whole life! Two Schoolgirl Diarists of the Eighteenth Century I.—HÉLÈNE MASSALSKI (_Paris 1771—1778_) In the rather demure little company of girls—Irish, German, Italian, English, and French—whom it has been my pleasant task to gather together, what on earth has naughty Hélène Massalski to do? And what good purpose could one hope to serve by reviving, for twentieth century Irish girls, and their mothers and teachers, the mischievous pranks and schoolgirl frolics of a little Polish maiden in her eighteenth century French convent? All I can say now is that Hélène Massalski _will_ not be kept away. “Here she comes,” with her scribbled diary, like Galuppi, “with his old music,” and here’s all the good it brings:— “What they lived once thus at Venice, where the merchants were the kings,”