She had begun by nursing her baby,—Rousseau demands it,—but when she came back from her favor-seeking at Paris the child—three years old—did not recognize her. “I am like the women who do not nurse their children; I have done better than they but I am no farther advanced.” At Le Clos she became thoroughly discouraged and decided to take up Rousseau again and study Émile and Julie on the education of children. She arrived at certain conclusions and as she was about to write her husband of them one day received a letter from him containing similar reflections. She replied with her full plan. The letter, hitherto unpublished, is very sensible.
“What a pleasure to find that we are one in our ideas as in our feelings, and for one never to have a plan that the other has not already thought of. For the last twenty-four hours I have been trying the method that you suggest with our little one. I had re-read Julie’s plan, and I had decided that we were too far away from it. Controlled by circumstances, we have either thought too much or not enough of our child. Busy in a kind of work which demands quiet, we have kept her at her tasks and her lessons, without taking time to cultivate a taste in her for them, or of choosing the times when she was the most disposed for them. When she has rebelled, and we have wanted her to be quiet, we have been willing to do anything to silence her, so that we could go on with our work.
“‘That which makes children cry,’ Julie says, ‘is the attention that is paid to them. It is only necessary to let them cry all day, a few times, without paying any attention to them, to cure them of the habit. If one pets them or threatens them, it has no effect. The more attention that you give to their tears, the more reason they have for continuing them. They will break themselves of the habit very soon when they see that no one takes notice; for, great and small, no one cares to give himself useless trouble.’ There, my good friend, is where we have been wrong. Julie’s children were happy and peaceable under her eyes, but they were subject to no one and only obliged to allow others the same liberty they enjoyed themselves.
“We want to be left in peace; that is just, but sometimes we constrain our child, and she takes her revenge as she can. Moreover, there is no use denying it, our little one has a strong will, and she has no sensibility and no taste. It must be that this is, in part, our fault, and because we have not known how to direct her. More than that, we risk making a still greater mistake in conquering her by force or by fear, though we have believed that it could be done in no other way. In acting thus, we are going to be unhappy, and our child is going to develop a hard and an unendurable obstinacy.
“I have resolved: first, never to get angry, and always to be calm and cold as justice itself when it comes to a question of correction.
“Second, never to use either whip or blow, movement or tone, which show impatience. Blows of whatever kind seem to me odious. They harden, debase, and prevent the birth of sentiment. On this score we have been guilty. When, as an infant, Eudora put her hands on something that she ought not to have touched, and did not take them off at the first word, it seemed to us that a little blow on her rebellious hand might have good effect. But that little blow has led to the whip; the child has become a torment, and we are annoyed by it; that little blow was a great mistake; it is time that we began over again, and we have not a moment to lose.
“Third, the child must be happier with us than with any one else; it is a question then of making her time pass more pleasantly when she is in our presence than it does elsewhere. That would not be very difficult if the mother was sewing or at housework, was free to talk with her sometimes and to teach her little tasks. In a library, between two desks, where severe research is going on and where silence is necessary, it is quite natural that the child grow weary; above all, if she is forbidden to sing or to chatter, and cannot play with any one.
“None of those persons who have written treatises on education have considered the student or those of a similar profession; they have treated the father or the mother as occupied solely in carrying out their duties, everything else being set aside for them. But the case is different here; you must carry on your work, and I am only too happy to aid you in it. I am a wife as well as a mother, and was the one before becoming the other.
“Let us try, then, while at our desks to have our child with us, and to see to it that she is happy beside us. For that we must leave her free as much as possible. If nature has not fitted her for study, let us not insist. Let us form her character as well as we can, and let the rest come by inspiration, not by punishment or caresses. Let us hold ourselves to these rules, and I am sure that the child will soon feel the justice and the necessity as well as the effect of our tenderness.
“For three days now I have not compelled her to do anything. She reads five or six times a day to amuse herself, and she seems to think that it is a good act. Without entirely lending myself to her little hypocrisy, I nevertheless pretend to be partially, at least, her dupe. In the evening she begs for music and I make a thousand excuses in order to have the lesson short, gay, and easy. The great thing is obedience. There have been scenes, I have punished her and she has wept; but I have pretended not to notice it, and have gone on with my work in perfect indifference. She has been obliged to stop some time, and it has never been very long.”