From the _lycée_ to French fiction is a big jump, and at first blush neither seems to have any connection with the other, yet I do not hesitate to blame the unhealthy, enervating, and unmanly training of the former for many of the lamentable scandals of the latter. English boys are not saintly, but they are certainly admitted, by those who have had opportunities of judging both, to be cleaner-minded, with a more vigorous and healthy outlook, than French lads. The same difference exists between French and English girls. To begin with, the French are naturally less frank and truthful; and where there is practised dissimulation it is not easy to answer for the moral and mental cleanliness of the young. These young fellows, whose sole distraction from excessive and futile mental labour has been the daily promenade in the courtyard, who have been the recipients of insidious confidences and unhealthy talk, leave school blighted and perverted. We need not ask ourselves what, in nine cases out of ten, follows, the tenth being the admirable youth who takes himself and his future responsibilities seriously, who loves knowledge with the disinterestedness and capacity for sacrifice to it that a Frenchman of the best kind is capable of. But these others, unsoundly bred, without an outlet for the barbarous spirits of the youthful male,—what will be their experiences? Denied exercise, they cannot even fall back upon innocent flirtation with girls of their own age, for this is not possible in France. And so these newly emancipated citizens straightway wander off in search of romance into a world that it would have been wise and right to keep them out of, and whatever freshness the _grisette_ may leave them can speedily be lost in the still more destructive hands of an unprincipled married woman. It is the shabby and monotonous love-affairs of this uninteresting rake, his steady degradation, that procure renown for the popular romances; to paint him and his dreary deceptions and drearier outrages on decent feeling a whole school of novelists exists and thrives, and the great desire of the newly married bride, never before permitted to read the fiction of her own land, is to learn what life is through his unmanly and ignoble adventures. Had the boy been trained differently he would have had another ideal, and there would have been some place for noble aspirations and generous sentiment in a heart not yet hardened by squalid cynicism. [Illustration: THE REFECTORY _A. Bouvin_]