He remained three years at Du Plessis. He found studying according to rule decidedly irksome, and very different from the solitary lessons at Chavaniac, where the few rules in force had been made for his benefit, if not for his convenience. He tells us that he was "distracted from study only by the desire to study without restraint," and that such success as he gained was "inspired by a desire for glory and troubled by the desire for liberty." Sometimes the latter triumphed. It amused him, when he was old, to recall how, being ordered to write an essay on "the perfect steed," he sacrificed a good mark and the praise of his teachers to the pleasure of describing a spirited horse that threw his rider at the very sight of a whip. The Collège Du Plessis must have been almost like a monastery. Each boy had a stuffy little cell into which he was locked at night. No member of a student's family might cross the threshold, and the many careful rules for health and diet were quite the opposite of those now practised. This period of Lafayette's school-days was a time when men's ideas on a variety of subjects were undergoing vast change. The old notion that learning was something to be jealously guarded and made as difficult and disagreeable as possible died hard. It is true that the good Fénelon, who believed in teaching children to read from books printed in French instead of in Latin, and who thought it could [Pg 11]do them no harm if the books were "well bound and gilded on the edge," had gone to his reward half a century before; but he had been writing about the education of girls! When Lafayette was only five years old one Jean Jacques Rousseau had published a fantastic story called _Émile_, which was nothing in the world but a treatise on education in disguise. In this he objected to the doctrine of original sin, holding that children were not born bad; and he reasoned that they did not learn better nor more quickly for having knowledge beaten into them with rods. But this man Rousseau was looked upon as an infidel and a dangerous character. Probably at Du Plessis the discipline and course of study belonged to the old order of things, though there were concessions in the way of teaching the young gentlemen manners and poetry and polite letter-writing, which they would need later in their fashionable life at court. History as taught them was hopelessly tangled up in heraldry, being all about the coats of arms and the quarrels of nobles in France and neighboring countries. When something about justice and liberty and the rights of the people did creep into the history lesson the tall young student from Auvergne fell upon it with avidity. Perhaps it was because of such bits scattered through the pages of Roman authors that he learned considerable Latin, and learned it well enough to remember it forty years later, when he found it useful to piece out his ignorance of German in talking with his Austrian jailers.