To the French it seemed odd and unnatural to see English parents sending their children off to boarding-schools, or to be educated abroad at the convent schools of Paris. In France young girls were kept at home with their mothers much more than in England. “Les parens se débarassent de leurs enfans,” writes La Combe in his “Tableau de Londres,” “en les jettant au hazard dans des pensions ou des académies. Ils semblent rougir de voir leurs enfans se former sous leurs yeux; ils prefèrent des étrangers, qui n’ont ni attachement ni la connaissance des passions des enfans qu’on leur confie, et les elévent tous avec indifférence sur le même plan. Il serait plus raisonnable d’avoir les enfans chez soi, d’étudier leur goût, leur penchant, de les façonner peu à peu par la douceur et les caresses, à la docilité au travail, à l’honnêteté et de les familiariser insensiblement avec tout ce qu’ils doivent savoir un jour et pratiquer dans la société. On est étonné, à Paris surtout, lorsqu’on voit arriver de jeunes Anglaises dans les couvents. Quoi? dit on, les mœurs sont donc bien corrompues à Londres pour nous charger d’élever les demoiselles.” As the century grew older the habits and amusements of the leisured classes spread to the trading community. “I will not presume to say that all the misfortunes the city of London at present labours under are owing to their preposterous fondness of following the fashions of the court; but that they are in a great measure so I believe most people will readily enough agree to.”[68] Speaking of a City dame who had taken up with the fashions of the West-end, the same writer observed-- “A great courtier now become, she looks with contempt on her former fellow-citizens, joins in the laugh coquets and beaus set up whenever any of them appear, and sees not that herself is equally an object of ridicule to those she is so vain of imitating. Thus despising and despised without one real friend, she lives a gawdy, glittering, worthless member of society, and endured by those whose example has rendered her such, on no other account than that immense wealth which they find means to share with her, while she imagines they are doing her an honour.” The busy merchants and traders whose wives were so eager to be in the fashion were themselves no less anxious to be up to the times. “I do not but see that the men are as eager to quit their compting houses and strut in the drawing-room disguised in a long sword and taper wig as the women can be in a new brocade, exactly the same pattern with that of one of the Princesses. The infection has spread itself pretty equally through both sexes. And the husband has little to reproach the wife with, or the wife the husband, but what each are guilty of in the same degree.”