French school of abnegation is full of intrigues, perfidies, injustices, petty persecutions, petty miseries. It makes men glad to be outside it, breathing the air of liberty and personal responsibility. An Englishman said to me one day, “There was only one honest man in the French army, and they turned him out.” This is naturally an extravagant assertion, but it expresses in wild fashion a secret feeling in the minority. “I was bred in the worship of the army, and brought up a fervent Catholic,” said an eminent French writer lately; “well, it is with difficulty now I keep myself from looking away when I see an officer or a priest.” There can be no denial that soldiers with a delicate conscience are not approved of in the French army. They are regarded as dangerous subjects, apt to create “affairs.” When a colonel exposed a scandalous abuse in a certain regiment, the President of the day sent him word that “a due regard for the honour of the army should prevent every officer from making an accusation, however justified, or creating any scandal that could diminish the prestige of the army.” The army, we see, is the one institution insusceptible to the rigours of justice, wherein ill-doers enjoy immunity (if they are not of Jewish persuasion) for the sake of that extraordinary thing called the “honour of the army.” [Illustration] CHAPTER V SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Education in France has neither the moral nor social value it has in England. In the first place, public-school life has nothing like the importance it has with us, where a university education almost suffices to make a gentleman of a young man, for, whatever his origin may be, the Oxonian is pretty sure to plume himself on the prestige of his training. In France there is no equivalent for this rank. Where a man has been educated is of no consequence to him in after life. While he is at school, his parents, if they happen to be nobles, or snobs who desire to pass for nobles, or as belonging to a set _bien pensant_, like to be able to say that their son is at the school of Vaugirard, Madrid, La Poste, or at the Marists. This fact suffices to pose a family with the hall-mark of indisputable correctness. Neither the Jesuits nor the Marists offer such solid advantages in the way of pretension and reputation as the English universities do, but they secure youth from the taint of Republicanism, and Society knows that it can rely on their support when the long and expected _coup d’êtat_ comes off. In certain circles, to be educated Is not the main thing, but not to be mistaken for one of the _canaille_.