Cambrai, to which, he was banished in 1697, and where he spent the last eighteen years of his life, was a town of no great size or beauty, on the river Scheldt, in the extreme north, near the Flemish frontier. It was the ecclesiastical center of the Flemish provinces which were conquered during the early half of the reign of Louis XIV, and confirmed to France by the treaty of Nimwegen in 1678. Formerly a dependency of the chaotic Empire, there still clung around it some of the prestige of departed glories when its bishop’s jurisdiction extended over Brussels, and he governed the territory with almost the power of an independent sovereign, having his own fortresses and garrisons and mint. Fénelon himself ranked both as a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and as a Duke of France, and, though possessing no feudal privileges, he was still the principal landholder of the province, with a floating revenue of some hundred thousand francs, perhaps about a hundred thousand dollars in modern money. It was one of the first positions in the kingdom; but it had some serious drawbacks, especially as a place of permanent residence. He had said on receiving the appointment, “All is vanity and vexation of spirit; I am entering on a state of perpetual servitude in a strange land.” The people there were Flemings, not Frenchmen, in their language, their habits, their modes of thought, with little refinement of any kind, their virtues as coarse-fibered as their manners. It was no small privation for a man like Fénelon—born for Olympus as it were, bred to the best society, and fitted to shine in it with so much luster, and in a time when, even more than now, everything centered around the court at the capital—to be shut out from it all, losing the sympathy and friendship which his earlier years had brought him, the daily intercourse with minds that reflected his own thoughts yet inspired and exhilarated him. For one in the flower of his manhood and at the zenith of his capacities, possessing the gift of language in a marvelous degree, with a filled and cultured brain, to be thrown so absolutely out of his element, out of the world of books and intellectual equals, exiled to a remote corner of the realm amid strangers, was a calamity whose gravity, on one side, it would be wrong to overlook. His sufferings, as nature goes, must have been acute. Yet he speedily adjusted himself to the situation, and there is no note of repining. For mere court favors, its dignities, pomps, and pleasures, he had no real love, and his whole life bears witness to the truth of his often repeated assertions, that he had no wish to return to Paris or Versailles; no wish, that is, under the divinely appointed circumstances; for he was able always to find in such circumstances his highest pleasure. Writing to the Duke de Beauvilliers in November, 1699, he says: “I am sorry, dear duke, to be separated from you, the dear duchess, and a very few other friends. But for all else I rejoice in