In the December of 1704, when he was ten years old, he first affixed his name--his baby name of Zozo--to a letter which Brother Armand dutifully wrote at his father’s request to wish an aunt in Poitou the compliments of the New Year 1705. That letter may be taken as the small beginning of one of the most enormous correspondences in the world, which new discoveries are still increasing in bulk, and which, as has been said, seems likely to go on increasing until the Day of Judgment. In that very same year 1704, Zozo was sent to the Jesuit College of St. Louis-le-Grand as a parlour boarder. The school was only a few minutes’ walk from his own home. But in that home there was no one to look after him save the busy middle-aged notary fully occupied in affairs. Catherine was married. Armand had already succeeded in repelling a volatile child’s spirit with his narrow harshness. So Zozo went to school, and took up his place in the very lowest class. St. Louis-le-Grand--“the Eton of France”--had two thousand pupils, mostly belonging to the French aristocracy. Louis XIV. had visited it, and left it his name. It was entirely under Jesuit influence, and taught, or omitted to teach, exactly according to the royal pleasure and the fashion of the day. A very thin-faced, keen-witted little youth was its new ten-year-old scholar. It did not take him long to conceive a passion for Cicero, for Horace, and for Virgil. He soon discovered that he was learning “neither the constitution nor interests of my country: not a word of mathematics or of sound philosophy. I learnt Latin and nonsense.” But he applied himself to that “Latin and nonsense” with that passionate voracity for information, useful or useless, good, bad, or indifferent, which he retained till his death. He must have been one of the quickest boys that ever Jesuit master taught. He had an intelligence like an arrow--and an arrow which always went straight to the mark. Before he was eleven he was writing bad verses with a facility and enthusiasm alike extraordinary. The masters were, with one exception, his friends and admirers. While the other boys were at their games this one would walk and talk with the Fathers; and when they told him that he should play like the others, he looked up with those brilliant eyes that lighted the little, lean, sallow face like leaping flames--“Everybody must jump after his own fashion,” said he. His especial tutor was a certain Abbé d’Olivet, then a young man, for whom the promising little scholar conceived a lifelong friendship. Another tutor, called Tournemine, was also first the boy’s teacher and then his pupil. Yet another Father, called Porée, would listen long and late to the child’s sharp questions on history and politics. “That boy,” said he, “wants to weigh the great questions of Europe in his little scales.”