Poisson, his tutor, was a careful but severe guide, and if ever he was softened, the marquis stepped in to chastise. Soon, too soon, the paternal scoldings and punishments became angry reprimands and constant disapprobation, which verged into hatred. These feelings were increased by the imprudences and vivacity of the boy, the misjudged quarrels of the mother, the artful manœuvres of madame de Pailly, and the bitter hatred conceived by an old servant named Gervin, who, from some unknown cause, exercised extraordinary influence over the marquis. The chief fault particularised by the father was the boy's habitual untruths. A love of or indifference to truth is one of the characteristics with which human beings are born. The former may be cultivated, the latter checked, but the propensities do not the less remain; and it is the most painful discovery that a parent can make, to find that his child is not by natural instinct incapable of falsehood. This innate and unfortunate vice, joined to the boy's wildness and heedlessness, caused the father to write of him in severe terms, scarcely suited to his' childish years. "He seems to me," he writes, "in addition to all the baseness of his natural character, a mere fool, an unconquerable maniac. He attends a number of excellent masters; and as every one, from his confessor to his playmate, are so many watchers, who tell me every thing, I discern the nature of the heart, and do not believe that he can come to any good." The first master, Poisson, set over him, however, took a liking to the boy, and praised his prodigious memory and good heart. The father, instead of being pleased, grew angry. He declared that he would now be utterly spoilt, and took him out of his hands to place him in those of an abbé Choquart, a severe disciplinarian, who was bid not to spare punishment. The severity of the marquis may be judged by this one circumstance, that taking his son from a tutor whom he loved, and placing him in a school to which he was sent as to a prison, he insisted that he should go by another name. "I did not choose," he writes, "that an illustrious name should be disgraced on the benches of a school of correction, and I caused him to be entered as Pierre Buffière. [Sidenote: 1764. Ætat. 15.] My gentleman struggled, wept, argued in vain. I bid him win my name, which I would only restore when he deserved it." Had the father been just the youth would soon have regained his affections and name. The abbé Choquart, at first severe with his pupil, soon became attached to and proud of him. His progress was astonishing, his memory prodigious. The dead and living languages, mathematics, drawing, and music, and various manly exercises, occupied him by turns, and he distinguished himself in all. In the midst of the marquis's vituperations we find no absolute facts. He calls his son lying by nature, base, and so vicious that the worst consequences are to be apprehended: this is carried so