Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/159

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themselves? When the present fashionable craze for mere "exterior" Catholicity—which is nothing more than an exasperated revolt against foreign influences, on a level, in the record of modern civilisation, with the outbreak of the Boxers of China—shall have exhausted itself, many of the lads will be mediocre freethinkers; the greater part will be what are euphemistically called "non-practical Catholics," that is, men who are not expected to go to Mass of a Sunday in the shooting season, because it interferes with their sport; who regard confession as a distraction for women; who allow neither God nor the devil to stand between them and the most shameless vices, but who are married and buried by the ritual of Holy Mother, the Church, and whose friends, after their death, piously contemplate them aloft, wreathed and winged, playing harps and chanting hymns, who in life never listened with pleasure to any but ribald songs and unedifying verse.

I have read attentively a little mémoire of the Stanislas College, relating all that is to be told about its routine and order. A sadder pamphlet in connection with boyhood could not be found anywhere. Not a moment's liberty, not an hour of honest gaiety; under the eye of the overseer from their up-rising to their down-lying. It is bad enough to think of girls so trained in convents; but as the world expects less initiative,