On this system, the mothers could not form close ties with their daughters, still less enter into their life. One mother, however, inspired by her ardent devotion to an only daughter, and at the same time thoroughly conversant with the actual necessities of life—Anne of France—has shown to what good account these apparently rudimentary opportunities might be turned, while paying due respect to the advice of Gerson and the physicians. She set down her views in a little work, of a purely practical and intimate character, designed for her daughter’s use, and written day by day with a certain desultoriness, according to the line her reflections or her reading happened to take, and without the slightest intention of supporting a thesis. This book imparts to us _ex abrupto_ the secret of her thoughts. She pinned her faith to education, not to instruction; she desired an education that was spontaneous and in some sort automatic, which would result, not from a perfect intimacy between mother and daughter, still less from a sentiment of equality, but solely from a kindly, frank, and affectionate association, of such a nature that the mother would colour her child’s character “as good wine colours its cask.” This gentle prescription assumes a wide mental culture to begin with, and a certain robustness of intelligence. Anne of France intended the moral and philosophic education of the girl to be carried out with the aid of Boethius, Plato, the fathers of the church, the ancient philosophers, and, it need hardly be said, in conformity with the “Instructions of St. Louis.” On the other hand she did not trouble to develop the imagination or the emotions: she had a horror of affectation, of all that appeared to her to smack of the studied, the conventional, the theatrical: she would not permit it anywhere, either in dress, in which she rejected false simplicity and false elegance alike, or in conversation, studies, or conduct. She loved only the splendour of truth, the glorification of the real in its noble aspects. It was her aim to temper the young girl’s soul by instilling into her the habit of searching enquiry and deep thought, and of building her reasoning always on clear premises like the certainty of death or the existence of God.