And so it was with the most illustrious ladies of France. Many of them were so devoid of instruction that they were unable either to read or to write. Even the teachers in Saint-Cyr were so deficient in the simplest rudiments of an education that Mme. de Maintenon found it necessary to correct their letters, in order to teach them the most essential rules of epistolary correspondence. In reality, the women of the age of Louis XIV did not trouble themselves about an education as we understand it. Endowed with esprit, with a natural and acquired taste for things intellectual, they were satisfied with such knowledge as they could glean from reading or conversation, and with comparatively few exceptions, showed no disposition to devote long years to study in school, much less in a university, as did their sisters to the south of the Alps. The foundress of Saint-Cyr had likewise been influenced by her environment as well as by the court--an environment which was becoming daily more and more unfavorable to the education, especially anything approaching the higher education, of women. A young woman's education was considered complete when she was able to read, write, dance and play some musical instrument. Anything more was deemed superfluous and deserving of censure and ridicule rather than praise. It was at this time that Moliere's two celebrated plays, _Les Femmes Savantes_ and _Les Precieuses Ridicules_, were given to the world. These well-known productions, replete with the author's brightest flashes of wit, and abounding in his most effective shafts of satire, produced at once an immense sensation. As soon as published, they were in the hands of everybody. Those who were opposed to the education of women--and the number was daily increasing--had recourse to them as to arsenals which supplied them with just the arms they had so long needed to decide in their favor the long warfare which they had been conducting against the gentler sex. The views of the bourgeois Chrysale as expressed to his sister, Belise, were so in harmony with their own that they loved on every occasion to repeat with him: