Madame de Maintenon relates that, when she was ten years old, she was brought up by her aunt Mme. de Villette. Little girls were not then punished for slander or lying, or even worse offences—no, the greatest crime in their governess's eyes was to mess one's apron or get it splashed with ink. For one thing, one was sure to be whipped, for the governess had to wash and iron the apron. Lie as much as you like, no notice was taken of that—there was nothing to wash and iron!
We must not lose sight of the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a quite different view was held of idle and intractable children than the present one. Our ideas would have seemed ridiculous to our fathers: they wouldn't have understood them. Not that discipline was always as rigourous as it was, according to Rabelais, in the Montagu College, where the pupils were treated worse than Moorish slaves, condemned murderers, dogs even! Such excesses, however, were not allowed in other schools, and cases are reported where teachers were charged in the courts for having ill-treated there pupils; others were dismissed for punching the boys. Still,
