And then the poor “pedant,” full of gall and bitterness, withdraws into his shell. After a long day of toil and drudgery, his only pleasure in life is to get back to his solitary room, and there spend the night in collating notes, collecting rare phrases, happy turns of expression, or hammering out verses, love poems addressed to a beauty whom luckily he does not know, or lyrical verses at a white heat of passion. And these productions of his heart (such of them, at least, as Fortune has deigned to preserve) lie to this day, bundles of them, in the dust of archives. Needless to add that the tutor considers himself martyred by the father. The father, who does not profess to love him, treats him indeed, more or less openly, as a tradesman and a nuisance, and interferes when the whim takes him, finding fault with this and that—the boy’s talkativeness, his pranks, his bad companions. He would like on the one hand less severity, on the other more progress. And then this youngster, who calls him “Sir,” and whom he always regards as a child, assumes mannish ways and threatens to follow at his heels: another serious drain upon his purse! Besides, what is the good of so many courses of study, of this “bookish swagger”? Can’t he learn everything without such a fuss? What, here is a child we are going to launch into actual life, and you stuff him with syllogisms, dates, a world of mere lumber! Did Alexander the Great learn all these things? He had, grant you, a tutor named Aristotle; ay, and with a few good moral principles for his whole kit he conquered the world! True, he respected the arts and sciences, he praised their “excellence and elegance,” but was he ever seen to grow pale and bite his nails over a problem in dialectics? No, indeed![69] The tutors were never safe from these annoyances, except perhaps in the houses of princes or kings, because then they were important personages, high functionaries, and a numerous body. The mother, on the contrary, made herself the friend of the tutor, and by this means exercised a perceptible influence upon him. She surrounded him with affectionate attentions. They were two natural allies, two feeble and down-trodden creatures who sought support in high communings which the husband did not understand. As a man of culture the tutor leant towards feminism, and he tasted doubly, for himself and for his pupil, the attentions, the solicitous benevolence, which a mother throws about the work of education. The palace of Louise of Savoy at Amboise thus saw a succession of special tutors who came to imbue Francis I. with aesthetic principles, and they retained the pleasantest recollections of their stay. The young princess indeed spoilt them, pampered them, almost; she had them at her own table, instead of leaving them to the society of chamberlains and playactors: she made them talk, and talked with them.