moral and mental cleanliness of the young. These young fellows, whose sole distraction from excessive and futile mental labour has been the daily promenade in the courtyard, who have been the recipients of insidious confidences and unhealthy talk, leave school blighted and perverted. We need not ask ourselves what, in nine cases out of ten, follows, the tenth being the admirable youth who takes himself and his future responsibilities seriously, who loves knowledge with the disinterestedness and capacity for sacrifice to it that a Frenchman of the best kind is capable of. But these others, unsoundly bred, without an outlet for the barbarous spirits of the youthful male,—what will be their experiences? Denied exercise, they cannot even fall back upon innocent flirtation with girls of their own age, for this is not possible in France. And so these newly emancipated citizens straight-*way wander off in search of romance into a world that it would have been wise and right to keep them out of, and whatever freshness the grisette may leave them can speedily be lost in the still more destructive hands of an unprincipled married woman. It is the shabby and monotonous love-affairs of this uninteresting rake, his steady degradation, that procure renown for the popular romances; to paint him and his dreary deceptions and drearier outrages on decent feeling a whole school of novelists exists
