Can anything be more absurd than the
differences of rank that divide the population of our provincial towns?
The same thing is seen in the country, where the clergyman holds aloof
from the village doctor, the farmer from the shopkeeper, both these from
the village schoolmaster, and where, indeed, everybody thinks himself
better than his neighbour.
We have, in English provincial towns, schools for the professional
classes, schools for the children of farmers, of wholesale shopkeepers,
of small retail tradesmen; lastly, schools for the "people," and you no
more expect to find a rich man's child attending the latter than a
chimney-sweep's son at the Grammar School. In French country towns all
this is simplified by the Ecole Communale, at which boys and girls
respectively, no matter what their parents' calling or means, receive
precisely the same education; after the Ecole Communale, comes the
College, where a liberal education is afforded to boys, and pupils study
for the examination of _Bachelier-es-Lettres et Sciences_, but are not
prepared as at the Lycees for the "Doctorate-in-Law." There is no other
school here for primary instruction of both sexes but the Communal
School, Protestant and Catholic, whither all the children, rich and
poor, patrician and proletaire, go as a matter of course.
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