To understand France in this and many other matters we must bear in mind that the whole tendency of modern French institutions is to produce, not what the English call the gentleman, but the middle-class man, or _bourgeois_, in enormous numbers. He is comfortably clothed, badly lodged, far too well fed, and educated in many studies, but not quite up to the point at which they would begin to be available for the intellectual life. The public schools where he gets this education are both too numerous in themselves and too numerously attended, besides being too cheap, for purposes of social distinction. All that education can do for a lad in France, at any school or college, is to place him in the _bourgeoisie_, that is to say, in the middle class. It does not, in the least, give him an approach to social equality with the aristocracy. Sons of peasants frequently rise in the _bourgeoisie_ by means of University degrees; but that is not much, and there they stop. There is not any University degree, however elevated, not even the double doctorate, which is recognised by what is called “Society” as conferring any claim whatever to come within its pale.[13] [Sidenote: Choice of School and University in England. Eton and Oxford.] [Sidenote: English always wrong about French _Lycées_.] [Sidenote: The Simple Fact.] [Sidenote: Princely and Humble _Lycéens_.] [Sidenote: Education of the Orleans Princes.] In England the choice of school and University has an immense influence on a boy’s future social position. Educate him at a grammar school or send him to Eton and Oxford, the difference to his future rank will be enormous. If an English mother has a son at Eton she is sure to let you know. All English people associate the idea of class distinctions with the different English schools, and they have an almost insuperable difficulty in realising the condition of things in France, where there is neither an Eton nor an Oxford, nor anything in the least degree resembling them from the social point of view. In this way the English are always wrong about the French _lycées_, because they begin by imagining the English class distinctions. The prevalent English idea about them is that they are low and cheap places. One English writer accepted it as evidence of the very humble origin of a distinguished Frenchman that he had been educated in a _lycée_. He could not realise the simple fact that the _lycées_ have nothing to do with social rank _either one way or the other_. My brother-in-law was educated at a _lycée_, and one of his ordinary class-fellows was a prince who is now actually reigning; other class-fellows may have been sons of small shopkeepers or poor clerks. Older Frenchmen are still living who were class-fellows of the Orleans princes at the _lycée Henri IV._ The princes worked like the others, and it was only thought a proof of their father’s good sense that he sent his boys to one of the best