When a child, Louis XIV. had two _baladins_. Mademoiselle had a dwarf who did not retire from her service until 1645. The registers of the Parliament (date, 10th May, 1645) contain letters patent and duly verified, by which the King accorded to "Ursule Matton, the dwarf of Mademoiselle, sole daughter of the Duke of Orleans, the power and the right to establish a little market in a court behind the new meat market of Saint Honoré."[10] Marie de Médicis completed the house and establishment of her granddaughter by giving her, for governess, a person of much virtue, wit, and merit, Madame de Saint Georges, who knew the Court thoroughly. Nevertheless Mademoiselle asserted that she had been very badly raised, thanks to the herd of flattering hirelings who thronged the Tuileries, and who no sooner surrounded her than they became insupportable. It is a common thing [said she] to see children who are objects of respect, and whose high birth and great possessions are continually the subject of conversation, acquire sentiments of spurious glory. I so often had at my ears people who talked to me either about my riches or about my birth that I had no trouble to persuade myself that what they said was true, and I lived in a state of vanity which was very inconvenient. While very young she had reached a degree of folly where it displeased her to have people speak of her maternal grandmother, Madame de Guise. "I used to say: '_She_ is my _distant_ grandmamma; _she_ is not Queen.'" It does not appear that Madame Saint Georges, that person of so much merit, had done anything to neutralise evil influences. Throughout the seventeenth century, opinions on the education of girls were very vacillating because little importance was attached to them. In 1687, after all the progress accomplished through the double influence of Port Royal and Madame de Maintenon, Fénelon wrote: Nothing is more neglected than the education of girls. Fashion and the caprices of the mothers often decide nearly everything. The education of boys is considered of eminent importance because of its bearing upon the public welfare; and while as many errors are committed in the education of boys as in the education of girls, at least it is an accepted idea that a great deal of enlightenment is required for the successful education of a boy. It was supposed that contact with society would be sufficient to form the mind and to polish the wit of woman. In this fact lay the cause of the inequality then noticeable in women of the same class. They were more or less superior from various points of view, as they had been more or less advantageously placed to profit by their worldly lessons, by the spectacle of life, and by the conversation of honest people.