hat they are entitled to full knowledge, and we feel that he is not
instructing them in the mysteries of that knowledge; he is taking for
granted, in the advice he gives and the stories he tells them, that his
"young and small daughters, not, poor things, overburdened with
experience," already possess the most precise knowledge of the intimate
facts of life, and that he may tell them, without turning a hair, the most
outrageous incidents of debauchery. Life already lies naked before them:
that he assumes; he is not imparting knowledge, he is giving good
counsel.[3]

[3] If the Knight went to an extreme in his assumption of his daughters'
knowledge, modern fathers often go to the opposite and more foolish
extreme of assuming in their daughters an ignorance that would be
dangerous even if it really existed. In _A Young Girl's Diary_
(translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul), a work that is
highly instructive for parents, and ought to be painful for many, we
find the diarist noting at the age of thirteen that she and a girl
friend of about the same age overheard the father of one of them--both
well brought up and carefully protected, one Catholic and the other
Protestant--referring to "those innocent children." "We did laugh so, WE
and _innocent children_!!! What our fathers really think of us; we
innocent!!! At dinner we did not dare look at one another or we should
have exploded." It need scarcely be added that, at the same time, they
were more innocent than they knew.

It is clear that this kind of education and this attitude towards
children must be regarded as the outcome of the whole mediaeval method of
life. In a state of society where roughness and violence, though not, as
we sometimes assume, chronic, were yet always liable to be manifested, it
was necessary for every man and woman to be able to face the crudest facts
of the world and to be able to maintain his or her own rights against
them. The education that best secured that strength and independence was
the best education and it necessarily involved an element of hardness. We
must go back earlier than Montaigne's day, when the conditions were
becoming mitigated, to see the system working in all its vigour.

The lady of the day of the early thirteenth century has been well
described by Luchaire in his scholarly study of French Society in the time
of Philip Augustus. She was, he tells us, as indeed she had been in the
preceding feudal centuries, oft