In a society where the birch was looked on as an indispensable teaching aid, indignation was unlikely to be long-lived, and so it was freely used in town and country. We will mention one case, because it recalls the name of a famous novelist. The grandfather of Restif de la Bretonne gave his son, aged eighteen, three strokes with a whip which fetched blood through his shirt, because he had spoken several times to a girl without permission. This same son, now a father of fourteen children, flogged them with more circumspection: in case of a serious punishment he simply threatened them with the whip at first, and allowed a week to pass between the threat and the flogging, so that it should impress the child more. This authority of the father over his children is still existent in rural districts. The Goncourts relate in their _Journal_ that an old friend of theirs, a doctor, had just married off his daughter. She quarrelled with her husband. Her father caught her up under his arm, turned up her skirts and unfastened her drawers, and soundly smacked her. Then, turning to his dumbfounded son-in-law, he calmly said: ‘There, that’ll quieten her down a bit.’ In a list of the personnel of the Mazarin College, dating from the eighteenth century, there appears this item: _Chevallier, floor-polisher and corrector_. This humble official represented an institution which had been preserved intact throughout the centuries. ‘How changed the times are!’ exclaimed Caraccioli, under Louis XVI. ‘Flogging is almost abandoned; conduct is governed more by honour than punishment, though the indecent and barbarous method of flogging is not yet entirely abolished.’ The rod was still a part of school equipment in the second half of the eighteenth century. Besnard reports that the head of the college where he studied always appeared in class armed with a flat strip of whale-bone which had a silver ferrule at each end. He would use this on the knuckles of inattentive pupils without any warning. He also kept a rod and whip handy, and freely used them. The cry of Erasmus’s student: _Væ nostris natibus_, was heard up to and beyond the revolutionary epoch. One of the institutions which no-one thought of attacking in the years preceding the cataclysm was this one of fustigation. The Abbé Morellet states that he was flogged by the jesuits every Saturday. Voltaire had a painful memory of blows received. Marmontel, a student of philosophy, escaped a flogging only by causing the whole college to revolt. La Reveillère-Lepeaux, a day-boarder at a priest’s, attributed his deformity to the blows he was always getting on his back. Lastly, G. de Pixérécourt the dramatist, even goes so far as to say that his liability to gout was contracted in early youth by his having to kneel on the threshold of the school to receive the floggings he was always getting.