These youths were termed pages, varlets, and damoiseaux, and they performed under their masters and mistresses the most humble and the most domestic functions: they followed them in their travels and to the chase; they formed part of their suites on occasions of ceremony; they wrote their letters and carried their messages; they waited on them at meals, carved their dishes, and poured out their drinks. In the eyes even of those nobles who were most jealous of their birth and of their name, this temporary and casual servitude had nothing in it either of a humiliating or degrading character, and its only effect was to knit still closer the ties of respect, obedience, and sympathy which bound the youth to his adopted parents, the aspirant for knighthood to his master and teacher. The latter by no means neglected the moral and religious education of the neophyte; the first lessons which were given him taught him not only to love God, but to respect women. As soon as the young page had acquired sufficient experience and discernment to direct his own movements in the intricacies of chivalric life, he was bidden to choose an ideal sovereign from among the noble and beautiful ladies of the aristocratic world that he frequented, a sort of terrestrial divinity whom he was to swear to serve, and to whom he was henceforth to recount all his thoughts and actions, treating her at the same time with all the delicacy and devotion which the example of those around him had shown him to be her due. He was taught, above all, to revere the august character of chivalry, and to respect, in the persons of the knights who composed this institution, the dignity to which he himself aspired. It was thus that, led by the instinct of imitation peculiar to the young, the pages habitually played at doing everything they saw done by the knights. They practised wielding the lance and the sword; they played at combats, attacks, and duels between themselves. Excited by emulation, they coveted the honour of being considered brave, hoping if they attained their wish, that it would lead to their being attached to the service of some person of mark, or to their being promoted to the rank of esquire.