“I have a boy,” he wrote to this friend, “who is now thirteen years old; I freely confess to you that he is not legitimate; but his mother was well born and was kinder to me than I deserved. As to the boy, perhaps it is partiality, but I think him amiable; he has a pretty face; he has much sprightliness, and I think intelligence, for his age. He speaks French perfectly; he knows a good deal of Latin and Greek, and he has ancient and modern history at his fingers’ ends. He is at school at present, but as they never dream of forming the manners of young people, and they are almost all foolish, awkward, and unpolished, in short such as you see them when they come to Paris at the age of twenty or twenty-one, I do not wish my boy to remain here to acquire such bad habits; for this reason, when he is fourteen I think of sending him to Paris. As I love the child dearly, and have set myself to make something good of him, as I believe he has the stuff in him, my idea is to unite in him what has never been found in one person before--I mean the best qualities of the two nations.” And he enters into the details of his plan, and the means he thinks of using: a learned Englishman every morning, a French teacher after dinner, but above all the help of the fashionable world and good society. The war which broke out between France and England postponed this plan, and the young man did not make his _début_ in Paris until 1751, when he was nineteen years old, and had finished his tour through Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Everything has been arranged by the most attentive of fathers for his success and well-being upon this novel scene. The young man is placed at the Academy with M. de la Guérinière; the morning he devotes to study, and the rest of the time is to be consecrated to the world. “Pleasure is now the last branch of your education,” this indulgent father writes; “it will soften and polish your manners; it will incite you to seek and finally to acquire _graces_.” Upon this last point he is exacting, and shows no quarter. _Graces_, he returns continually to them, for without them all effort is vain. “If they are not natural to you, cultivate them,” he cries. He indeed speaks confidently; as if to cultivate graces, it is not necessary to have them already!