My next and still greater charge against conventual education is the elimination by strict supervision of all sentiment of honour. In France two girls are forbidden to talk in the recreation-ground. When they are seen to do so, instead of being separated in an open fashion, a third is secretly ordered to go and join them in a friendly way, and then return and report the subject of their talk to the nun in charge. Needless to say, only the girls regarded as trustworthy and virtuous are told off for this diplomatic duty. I myself, being a hopelessly black sheep, and, in consequence, excellent material for the exercise of this peculiar form of virtue, was long enough its victim before I grasped the fact, and could not understand how reverend mothers and such exalted personages came to be familiar with all my whispered revolutionary chatter. It would be wonderful if girls so trained should in after life scruple to read letters, to steam them if necessary, to listen at doors, and to betray confidences of every kind. And girls who know no other form of distraction and play than the dull walking up and down the recreation-ground, the nightly trial of round games, where you sit in a large circle on benches, with a string and a button attached to it, which one girl passes to the other through her closed fist, all singing French rondes, such as J’ai perdu le cor de ma clarionette, or Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre, or the glories of Cadet Roussel? And this, remember, for girls of sixteen and seventeen—craving intelligent and exciting pastimes!
How fervently I used to bless the headache or cold that permitted me to slip up to bed after supper, and escape from the evening recreation into the more peopled and interesting solitude of my own thoughts. Things may be better since my day. Tennis, bathing, golf, cricket, and racing may now be admitted as feminine pastimes in those holy establishments where I spent so many miserable and profitless years. I hear that even baths are introduced, and that it is no longer deemed by French nuns an offence against modesty to wash oneself. But I recall a very different state of affairs—a state so curious that my French friends do not like to credit it when I assure them of it. I was fourteen when I was sent to school in France to acquire the tongue of courts and diplomacy. On the first morning that I awoke in the long, white-curtained dormitory, I proceeded to wash and dress myself as I had been taught to wash and dress in English convents. I had deposited my dressing-gown on my bed, and was splashing my neck with water, when, to my astonishment, a nun approached me noiselessly, lifted my dressing-gown from the bed, and holding her shocked glance averted murmured, La pudeur, mon enfant, la pudeur, as she covered my dripping neck in the folds of my dressing-gown. When I clamoured for an explanation, I was told it was not considered decent in France for a young girl to wash her neck. We were worse off than the young gentlemen of Stanislas, whose feet are washed once a week; ours were washed only once a fortnight, and then a cloth was kept over them, lest the sight of our naked feet in the water should lead to the loss of our souls. For the years I was there, nobody, to my knowledge, ever had a bath of any kind. However, this is all changed, I am happy to say. French nuns have had to move with the times and accept the modern institution of baths.
I hope they have also grown to accept the institution of men. When I was at school we were strictly forbidden to lift our eyes to a man’s face. When the old doctor of eighty passed through the courtyard, if any of us happened to be about there was an instant cry of alarm, Baissez les yeux, mesdemoiselles. Il y a du monde. Du monde always meant the wolf in trousers and coat, and we were invited ever to tremble, blush, and lower our eyes in the dreadful creature’s presence. It was a garrison town, and whenever we walked abroad and found officers upon our path nuns would skurry down our black-robed ranks, crying in terrified undertones, Baissez les yeux, mesdemoiselles. Messieurs les officiers vous regardent. Will any one explain to me the mental and moral value of such training? Is it not shocking that innocent girls should be bred in the notion that there is any reason why they should not look men frankly and simply in the face?
CHAPTER VI
NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
Among the national institutions of France, the place of honour must undoubtedly be given to the Académie Française; not because of its utility, still less for the amount of respect and admiration it deserves. My own opinion is, that a more fantastic and ridiculous institution was never invented; and to-day it has no connexion between our democratic times and the monstrous period in which it was founded. Why forty respectable gentlemen who happen to have written books more or less good (and by no means always such as to justify their election), composed tolerable operas, written amusing or instructive plays, as the case may be, should not have been content with the applause and pence of their fellows, but must needs array themselves in an absurd uniform, with triumphant green palm-leaves embroidered over a modern coat, and a toy sword at their side, and play at immortality, is what I have never been able to understand. As if the votes of his contemporaries can possibly decide the question of a man’s immortality!
Read over the lists of academicians since Richelieu’s time, and see how many among all those names you will ever have heard of. Intrigue and prejudice frequently settle the question of a day’s immortality. But in the case of a century’s fame it requires solid merit of a higher order than that which is often necessary to secure the election of a candidate to an armchair among the favoured Forty. Flaubert and Maupassant assuredly hold very different places in French literature from those occupied by the mild André Theuriet and the dull Paul Bourget; and it is as difficult to explain the absence of Balzac from this literary club half a century ago as it is to explain the presence there to-day of M. Henri Lavedan. The mystified foreigner notes that Balzac created the colossal Comédie Humaine, and that M. Lavedan wrote Le Vieux Marcheur, and is apt to tell himself gleefully that the judgment of the elect in France is no wiser, no more judicious, than that of the common herd elsewhere. But of course the institution, with its pretentious traditions, its mock air of the ancien régime, is only a club, whose members choose their society upon other than intellectual grounds. There is a great deal of wire-pulling, too, in the matter, chiefly done by women. In fact, when the noble dames of the Faubourg decide to run a candidate, he is pretty certain to be elected. Loti was run by those ladies, and the first thing he did was to scare the club by breaking with all its traditions and making a mockery of academic urbanity. Lavedan, as a reactionary candidate, was naturally the protected of clericals, aristocrats, and the flower of snobbery, and committed a still greater breach of academic etiquette than Loti, by a veiled and sneering attack upon the dead he was deputed to belaud.