If in school-time any of them were speaking, and their teacher reproved them, they answered, 'Vous mentez, Mademoiselle, vous êtes menteuse, je ne parle pas.' Indeed, if they were doing a thing all the time they were spoken to, they did not scruple to say they were not. There were, beside Madame Crosnier, Mademoiselle Allemagne, the first teacher; Mademoiselle Croissé, the drawing mistress, who also taught in the schoolroom; and Annette, a kind of half teacher, who had been one of the _young ladies_. I certainly never saw an English kitchen-maid dressed in the way she was. A dirty cap without a border, a black petticoat, a coarse blue gown tucked up like a bed-gown, a very coarse kind of linen apron, and shoes down at the heels, completed her dress. She used to go about with a broom sweeping the rooms. The girls took it by turns to clean the schoolrooms once every week. They used to tuck up their frocks, sweep the dirt into the _cabinet noir_ (or closet into which the litters were swept), and then throw a pail of water on the floor and mop it up. Miss Stephens used to call it her _malheureuse semaine_. The first morning we went earlier than usual, school had not begun, and a number of dirty girls were sitting or rather lying on the floor about the passages, looking like a set of gypsies. We went upstairs to the _salle de dessin_. Mademoiselle Croissé taught drawing. She was tall and sallow, and was reckoned pretty. She had a pair of staring black eyes, and a great deal of long black hair, which she seemed to admire very much, and used to bring in pieces of butter in a curl-paper and grease it beside us. She had done two very pretty drawings, which she kept to show. We sat down to our drawing. Mademoiselle Croissé drew us an eye for a copy and left us; we might do it or not, just as we pleased, she never looked near us. Little Miss Fitzgerald had been learning drawing for a great many months, but she had only drawn two or three sheets full all the time. Nearly every day that I was there she did not even get out her paper, but sat playing, talking, or running out of the room. Mademoiselle Croissé used sometimes to stand at the window, and if she happened to see a cat, she had such a dislike to the sight of cats that she was obliged to send one of the girls from their drawing to drive these animals away. At other times she was out of the room, or employed with her own drawing, so that she had hardly time to tell us how our drawings looked when we had done them. Once when we had just settled to our drawings (Mademoiselle Croissé absent as usual), in came two of the maids--'Mademoiselle, il faut sortir, car je vais baller la chambre'; we were therefore obliged to decamp. The servants were the rudest set I ever saw. Catherine had a music mistress, Mademoiselle Pascal; but she begged to have her no longer. One of the pianos would hardly sound, and they had no additional keys. The mistress did not seem to understand