He had resolved that his son should follow the family career of a merchant, and his education was planned accordingly on those lines. He was taken to France in 1797, and left at Havre for two years. For the next three years he attended a private school at Hamburg. During this time, discontent with his father's plans for his future was gradually ripening within him. To reconcile him, he was promised a trip to France and England, on the condition that he promised to give up his own desires and ambitions, and to be loyal to his father's wishes. The prospect of the journey was too alluring, and he gave the required promise. After six weeks had been spent in London, his parents left him at a boarding-school at Wimbledon. In letters to his mother, he complains of the mechanical instruction, the dreary Sunday services, and the tedious routine of the school. She, in reply, warns him not to give way to bombast and empty pathos. He became proficient in English, and always held English character and intelligence in admiration, although he was impressed by the prevalent hypocrisy and the oppressive pietism of the time. He was busy {18} already recording his impressions, describing characteristically the feelings and ideas awakened in him rather than the actual facts and events. The travellers returned through France, from Geneva to Vienna, and thence to Berlin. For about four months Schopenhauer now worked in a Dantzig office, trying to acquire the rudiments of a business training. When almost seventeen, he entered the employment of a firm in Hamburg. He himself has recorded that there never was a worse clerk in a merchant's office. In his leisure, and during office hours whenever possible, he was reading voraciously. In 1805 his father died, whether by accident or by his own hand remains uncertain. For two years longer Schopenhauer stuck to his hated task, out of loyalty to his father, and the promise made him some years earlier. But at last he could stifle his ambitions and yearnings towards a purely intellectual life no longer, and he obtained his mother's consent to leave his office, and to begin preparation for a learned career.