All the great houses received daily twenty to twenty-five people to dinner, and the conversation was hardly of a nature to admit of the presence of young girls. The dinner hour was at one o’clock, they separated at three, and at five went to the theatre, whenever their duties did not summon them to Versailles; after which they returned home, bringing with them as many friends as possible. What time could have been devoted to the children in a day so fully occupied? The mothers felt this, and by placing their daughters in a convent did the best they could for them. But we shall see, by the life of the young Princess herself, how incomplete was an education thus carried on by women, themselves utterly ignorant of the world, and therefore unfit to prepare their pupils for the temptations that there awaited them. These _Memoirs_, begun by a child of nine years old and continued till she was fourteen, commence with her entry into the Convent and end on the eve of her marriage. They were not intended to be published, and have lain by for over a hundred years in their old cases, from whence, with M. Adolphe Gaiffe’s kind permission, we brought them to light, when searching through his splendid libraries at the Château d’Oron and in Paris. There, amongst treasures of the sixteenth century and austere Huguenot authors bound in black shagreen, or dark turkey leather, we found the journals of the little Princesse Massalska, whose bright blue, yellow, and red covers contrasted with those of their sterner neighbours. Their genuineness is unquestionable. The margins covered with childish caricatures, and scribbled over with her or her companions’ jokes, like any schoolboy’s book; the old yellow-stained paper, the faded ink, the large handwriting, which gradually improves; the incorrect and careless style of the first chapters, which towards the end becomes remarkable for its elegance;--all combine to show us that these _Memoirs_ are really the production of a precocious and intelligent child. The Princess died forty years after having written them, and she only mentions them twice in her correspondence. She simply says that one day at Bel Œil, the residence of the Prince de Ligne, her father-in-law, she read some passages of the _Memoirs_ she wrote when she was a little girl, and that her husband was so amused by them that he wanted to print a couple of chapters in his private printing-press. Twenty years later, during a long winter in Poland, she read them to her daughter, the Princesse Sidonie, and was much pleased at finding her childish recollections so ingeniously expressed.