‘Imagine our disgust,’ writes Miss Beale, ‘at being required to read English history in Mrs. Trimmer, to learn by heart all Murray’s grammar, to learn even lists of prepositions by heart, in order that we might parse without the trouble of thinking. I learned them with such anger that the list was burnt into my brain, and I can say it now. The “Use of the Globes,” too, we were taught, and very impertinent was I thought for asking a reason for some of the tricks we were made to play with a globe under the direction of Keith. We used indeed to read collectively Robertson’s _Charles the Fifth_, i.e. it was read aloud on dancing evenings. Each class went out in succession for the dancing lesson; thus no one read the whole book, though the school in its corporate capacity did. I felt oppressed with the routine life; I, who had been able to moon, grub, alone for hours, to live in a world of dreams and thoughts of my own, was now put into a cage and had to walk round and round like a squirrel. I felt thought was killed. Still, I know now that the time was well spent. The mechanical order, the system of the French school was worth seeing, worth living in, only not for long.’[18] One personal glimpse we have of the sisters at school in a letter of Mr. Beale’s to Dorothea: ‘I thought your last letter very nicely written; tell Eliza so, though it did not apply to hers. She does not write much, though in the right spirit too: but a genteel hand is of great importance. I am aware it requires much practice.’ The old-fashioned word exactly describes the neat, fine, pointed handwriting, which is preserved for us in two or three French exercise-books of the time. This writing soon after began to suffer from too much of the German character, and later still more from unduly ambitious haste. There is also in existence a thin book of _dictées_ signed _Dorothée_, belonging to this period. The teacher has written at the foot of one or two of these, after the enumeration of a few omitted commas and accents, a word surely inapt as bestowed on this pupil, ‘_Etourdie_.’ The school was brought to an untimely end by the Revolution of 1848, when a mob surrounded the house demanding garden-tools as firearms. These were not available, but Miss Bray faced the men and persuaded them to leave quietly. Before this incident occurred Dorothea Beale and her sisters had been fetched home by a brother, who did not, however, leave Paris without taking them round the city to see as much as they could of the movements of the Revolution.