on of collective
education. The son is brought up among the Jesuits, the daughter by
the Ursulines, or other nuns; the mother is left alone.

The mother and the son are henceforth separated! An immense evil, the
bud of a thousand misfortunes for families and society! I shall return
to this subject later.

Not only separated, but, by the effect of a totally opposite life, they
will be more and more opposed in mind, and less and less able to
understand each other. The son a little pedant in _us_, _i.e._ Latin,
the mother ignorant and worldly, have no longer a common language
between them.

A family thus disunited will be much more open to influence from
without. The mother and the child, once separated, are more easily
caught; though different means are employed. The child is tamed, and
broken in by an overwhelming mass of studies; he must write and write,
copy and copy again, at best translate and imitate. But the mother is
entrapped by means of her excessive loneliness and _ennui_. The lady
of the mansion is alone in her residence; her husband is hunting, or at
the court. The president's lady is alone in her hotel; the gentleman
starts every morning for the palace, and returns in the evening: a sad
abode is this hotel in the Marais or City, some overgrown grey house in
a dismal little street.

The lady in the sixteenth century beguiled her leisure hours by
singing, and often by poetry. In the seventeenth they forbad her all
worldly songs; as to religious songs, she abstains from them much more
easily. Sing a psalm! It would be to declare herself a Protestant!
What then remains for her? Gallant devotion--the conversation of the
director or the lover.

The sixteenth century, with its strong morality and fluctuation of
ideas, took, as it were, by fits and starts, flying leaps from
gallantry to devotion, then from God to the devil: it made sudden and
alternate changes from pleasure to penitence. But in the seventeenth
century people were more ingenious. Thanks to the progress of
equivocation, they are enabled to do both at once, and, by mingling the
language of love with that of devotion, speak of both at the same time.
If, without being seen, you could listen to the conversation in a
coquettish neighbourhood, you would not always be able to say whether
it is the lover or the director who is speaking.

To explain to one's self the singular success of the latter, we must
not forget the moral situation