When Marc, as the result of such incidents, felt overcome with despair and disgust, there was only one spot where he found any comfort. That was the private room of Salvan, the Director of the Beaumont Training College. He visited Salvan frequently during the trying winter months, when his colleague Férou was starving at Le Moreux and contending against Abbé Cognasse. He spoke to his friend of the revolting wretchedness of the poor ill-paid schoolmaster, beside the prosperity of the fatly-kept priest. And Salvan admitted that such wretchedness was the cause of the discredit into which the position of elementary schoolmaster was fast falling. If students for the Training Colleges were only recruited with difficulty, it was because the paltry stipend of fifty-two sous a day, allowed a man when he became a titular head-master at thirty years of age, no longer tempted anybody. The peasants' sons who were anxious to escape the plough, and among whom both the Training Colleges and the Seminaries found most of their pupils, now preferred to go to the towns in search of fortune, to engage in commerce there, and even to become mere clerks. It was only exoneration from military service, obtained by signing a contract to follow the teaching profession for at least ten years, that still induced some of them to enter that calling, in which so little money and so few honours were to be won, whereas a deal of worry and a deal of scorn were to be expected by all. Yet the recruiting of the Training Colleges was the great question, on which the education of the country, its very strength and salvation, depended. Co-equal with it in importance was that of the exact training to be given in those colleges to the schoolmasters of the future. It was necessary to animate them with the flame of reason and logic, to warm their hearts with the love of truth and justice. The recruiting depended entirely on the grant of higher remuneration to the profession, such reasonable remuneration as would enable a schoolmaster to lead a life of quiet dignity; whilst as for the training of the future teachers an entirely new programme was needed. As Salvan rightly said, on the value of the elementary master depended the value of elementary education, the mentality of the poorer classes, who formed the immense majority of the community. And beyond that matter there was that of the future of France. Thus the question became one of life or death for the nation.