But for real and uncompromising severity towards children we must turn to France, where for years the traditions of decorum and discipline were handed down in noble families, and generations of boys and girls suffered grievously therefrom. Trifling faults were magnified into grave delinquencies, and relentlessly punished as such. We sometimes wonder whether the youthful Bertrand du Guesclin were really the wicked little savage that the old chroniclers delight in painting, or whether his rude truculence was not very much like that of naughty and neglected boys the world over. There is, after all, a pathetic significance in those lines of Cuvelier’s which describe in barbarous French the lad’s remarkable and unprepossessing ugliness:-- “Il n’ot si lait de Resnes à Disnant, Camus estoit et noirs, malostru et massant. Li père et la mère si le héoiant tant, Que souvent en leurs cuers aloient desirant Que fust mors, ou noiey en une eaue corant.” Perhaps, if he had been less flat-nosed and swarthy, his better qualities might have shone forth more clearly in early life, and it would not have needed the predictions of a magician or the keen-eyed sympathy of a nun to evolve the future Constable of France out of such apparently hopeless material. At any rate, tradition generally representing him either as languishing in the castle dungeon, or exiled to the society of the domestics, it is plain he bore but slight resemblance to the cherished _enfant terrible_ who is his legitimate successor to-day. Coming down to more modern times, we are met by such monuments of stately severity as Madame Quinet and the Marquise de Montmirail, mother of that fair saint Madame de Rochefoucauld, the trials of whose later years were ushered in by a childhood of unremitting harshness and restraint. The marquise was incapable of any faltering or weakness where discipline was concerned. If carrots were repulsive to her little daughter’s stomach, then a day spent in seclusion, with a plate of the obnoxious vegetable before her, was the surest method of proving that carrots were nevertheless to be eaten. When Augustine and her sister kissed their mother’s hand each morning, and prepared to con their tasks in her awful presence, they well knew that not the smallest dereliction would be passed over by that inexorable judge. Nor might they aspire, like Harriet Martineau, to shield themselves behind the barrier of a lie. When from Augustine’s little lips came faltering some childish evasion, the ten-year-old sinner was hurried as an outcast from her home, and sent to expiate her crime with six months’ merciful seclusion in a convent. “You have told me a falsehood, mademoiselle,” said the marquise, with frigid accuracy; “and you must prepare to leave my house upon the spot.”