The La Fayettes were not rich, though they were the great people of their neighborhood. Only one Frenchman in a hundred belonged to the nobility, but that one received more consideration than all the other ninety-nine combined. When the boy marquis rode out with his mother, or that stately lady his grandmother, the peasants in the little village which had grown up around the walls of Chavaniac, clinging to it for protection, bowed down as though the child were a sovereign. [Pg 7]Some of them knelt in the dust as the coach passed by. Truly it was strange soil for the growth of democratic ideas. It was well for the boy's soul that in spite of lands and honor the household was of necessity a frugal one. The wide acres were unproductive. Men who had fought so often and so well for their princes had found little leisure to gather wealth for their children. Besides, it was thought out of the question for a nobleman to engage in gainful pursuits. The wealth such men enjoyed came through favor at court; and in this household of women there was no longer any one able to render the kind of service likely to be noticed and rewarded by a king. [Illustration: THE MANOR-HOUSE OF CHAVANIAC Birthplace of Lafayette] So the lad grew from babyhood in an atmosphere of much ceremony and very little luxury. On the whole, his was a happy childhood, though by no means gay. He loved the women who cherished him so devotedly. In his _Memoirs_, written late in life, he calls them "tender and venerated relatives." They looked forward to the day when in his turn he should become a soldier, dreading it, as women will, but accepting it, as such women do, in the spirit of _noblesse oblige_, believing it the one possible calling for a young man of his station. To prepare him for it he was trained in manly exercises, by means of which he outgrew the delicacy of his earliest years and became tall and strong for his age. He was trained also in horsemanship, to which he took kindly, for he loved all spirited animals. In books, to which he did not object, [Pg 8]though he was never wholly a scholar, he followed such studies as could be taught him by the kindly Abbé Feyon, his tutor.