After nursing him at her bosom, giving him her own life twice, as
it were, after guiding his footsteps as a little child, the mother had
put him with all his virgin innocence into the hands of the pastor,
who, out of true reverence for the family, had promised to give him a
thorough and Christian education. Calyste thenceforth received the
instruction which the abbe himself had received at the Seminary. The
baroness taught him English, and a teacher of mathematics was found,
not without difficulty, among the employes at Saint-Nazaire. Calyste
was therefore necessarily ignorant of modern literature, and the
advance and present progress of the sciences. His education had been
limited to geography and the circumspect history of a young ladies'
boarding-school, the Latin and Greek of seminaries, the literature of
the dead languages, and to a very restricted choice of French writers.
When, at sixteen, he began what the Abbe Grimont called his
philosophy, he was neither more nor less than what he was when Fanny
placed him in the abbe's hands. The Church had proved as maternal as
the mother.
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