Hence, Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet time to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could wear, and had bestowed her… In France, a predominantly Catholic country, the church was the chief educator for women from the ninth century forward.
In the 18th century, however, the practice of sending girls to convents began to draw criticism from progressive thinkers. Cloistering young women was thought to keep them too innocent of the world and human nature.
Especially for the daughters of aristocrats, who were often married by the arrangement of their relations directly from the convent, a cloistered education in no way prepared them for the position they were immediately to undertake Fein A score is twenty; the term is apparently derived from the practice of counting sheep off in groups of twenty and making a notch, or score, on a stick to keep track of the number OED.
Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur.
Among the most famous of the French 18th-century philosophes were Voltaire and Diderot Gay Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up; and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty. In actuality, sending a child to a wet-nurse compromised its chances of survival. Dickens uses the term here to invoke a deteriorative and disfiguring condition. Archived Novels. Here, indeed, lies properly the cardinal symptom of the whole wide-spread malady.
Faith is gone out; Skepticism is come in. Previous Next. Getting whiplash yet? Just wait… Our narrator describes the way that Monseigneur, a member of the French aristocracy, makes his hot chocolate in the morning. Actually, Monseigneur would never dream of making his own chocolate. He has servants to do that for him. Four servants, to be precise.
Monseigneur remains convinced that the world has been created for Monseigneur and his pleasures. Wait, who is this Monseigneur guy, exactly? See, the more we read, the less he seems like a real guy. For now, just think of him as Aristocrat X. Gold and masques and wigs and silk stockings abound. Monseigneur had been out to dinner the night before, where the Comedy and the Grand Opera had been performed.
Monseigneur went out to dinner most nights, and there were always interesting people around. Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go his way—tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general and particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the world was made for them. For specific kinds of public business he had another respectable idea: that it should benefit him personally and give him more power or money.
He believed that the world had been created to bring him pleasure. As to finances public, because Monseigneur could not make anything at all of them, and must consequently let them out to somebody who could; as to finances private, because Farmer-Generals were rich, and Monseigneur, after generations of great luxury and expense, was growing poor.
Hence Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet time to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could wear, and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General, poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane with a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the outer rooms, much prostrated before by mankind—always excepting superior mankind of the blood of Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down upon him with the loftiest contempt.
However, the monseigneur had slowly discovered that things were not going well in his private and public financial affairs, so he had become close with the tax collector. He relied on him for private finance, because tax collectors were rich, and after many years of living in luxury the monseigneur was running out of money. He had pulled his sister out of a convent before she had become a nun where she would have worn a veil—the cheapest garment she could wear. Instead, he made her marry a very rich tax collector whose family was of a lower class.
This tax collector, who was appropriately carrying a cane with a golden apple on top, was one of the people in the other room.
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