The vacations of the Foch children were passed at the home of their paternal grandparents in Valentine, a large village about two miles from the town of St. Gaudens in the foothills of the Pyrénées. There they had the country pleasures of children of good circumstances, in a big, substantial house and a vicinity rich in tranquil beauty and outdoor opportunities. And there, as in the children's own home at Tarbes, one was ashamed not to be a very excellent child, and, so, worthy to be descended from a chevalier of the great Napoleon.
In the mid-sixties the family moved from Tarbes to Rodez—almost two hundred miles northeast of their old locality in which both parents had been born and where their ancestors had long lived.
It was quite an uprooting—due to the father's appointment as paymaster of the treasury at Rodez—and took the Foch family into an atmosphere very different from that of their old Gascon home, but one which also helped to vivify that history which was Ferdinand's passion.
There Ferdinand continued his studies, as also at Saint-Étienne, near Lyons, whither the family moved in 1867 when the father was appointed tax collector there.
And in 1869 he was sent to Metz, to the Jesuit College of Saint Clément, to which students flocked from all parts of Europe.
He had been there a year and had been given, by unanimous vote of his fellow students, the grand prize for scholarly qualities, when the Franco-Prussian war began.
Immediately Ferdinand Foch enlisted for the duration of the war.