Girlhood was not a delightful fiction which permits infinite hopes to be cherished, and keeps realities hidden; it was rather an apprenticeship; and after all, since the wife has a personal mission to accomplish in the world, which will consist, so to speak, in patching and renovating hearts that are rent, this apprenticeship seems as necessary to her as to a laundress or a dressmaker. The art cannot be learnt more successfully than in maidenhood. From the moment this was admitted, it is correct to say, girls received the same education as men: with this qualification, that their education was more thorough, because they made a later beginning in life. In the first place, they had male teachers, or even a tutor. Margaret of France, like her brother, was taught only by tutors—a singular anomaly at a time when women plumed themselves on their superiority, and one which we shall not seek to explain. Humanists with the highest admiration for woman’s intellect held governesses in horror,[90] and allowed no discussion about the monopoly of instruction; even in Spain, the country of learned women, Vivès insisted on instruction by men. And yet the market was not overstocked with women’s tutors; the part usually fell to more or less second-rate persons, who accepted it light-heartedly enough; even in princely houses there was considerable difficulty in keeping a man of real earnestness. These young fellows readily transformed themselves into friends and comrades: Brantôme accuses them of a thousand irregularities, and goes so far as to match them with the physicians and apothecaries. Some of them were known, it appears, to elope with their pupils, but that we must believe to have been purely casual, and their gaiety to have taken, as a rule, a more delicate form. Eustorg de Beaulieu[91] smilingly reminds one of his pupils, now a staid wife and mother at Tulle, of the time when she raved about her lessons, and said she would rather go to the clavecin than to confession. Another pupil of his, the young Helen Gondy of Lyons, called him in fun “her Hector,” a title which he accepted on the distinct understanding that he was not stupidly to die for her, “like the other Hector.” A third, Mademoiselle de Tournon, conceived the idea of making a bishop of this excellent, jovial, amiable professor; but this time Eustorg raised objections, and declared flatly that he was sure his skull was too thick.