He has been taken in hand before his twelfth year, when very young; his cure, who has been instructed from above to secure suitable subjects, has singled him out in the catechism class and again at the ceremony of confirmation;[5267] he is found to have a pious tendency and a taste for sacred ceremonies, a suitable demeanor, a mild disposition, complacency, and is inclined to study; he is a docile and well-behaved child; whether an acolyte at the altar or in the sacristy, he tries to fold the chasuble properly; all his genuflexions are correct, they do not worry him, he has no trouble in standing still, he is not excited and diverted, like the others, by the eruptions of animal spirits and rustic coarseness.

If his rude brain is open to cultivation, if grammar and Latin can take root in it, the cure or the vicar at once take charge of him; he studies under them, gratis or nearly so, until he has completed the sixth or the seventh grade, and then he enters the lower seminary.[5268] This is a school apart, a boarding-house of picked youths, an enclosed hot-house intended for the preservation and development of special vocations.

None of these schools existed previous to 1789; at the present day( in 1885), they number 86 in France, and all the pupils are to become future priests.

No foreign plants, no future laymen, are admitted into this preparatory nursery;[5269] for experience has shown that if the lower seminary is mixed it no longer attains its ecclesiastical purpose; "it habitually turns over to the upper seminary only the bottom of the classes; those at the top seek fortune elsewhere".

But if, on the contrary, "the lower seminaries are kept pure, the entire rhetoric[5270] class continues on into the upper seminary; not only do they obtain the bottom of the classes but the top."-- The culture, in this second nursery, which is prolonged during five years, becomes extreme, wholly special; it was less so under the ancient regime, even at Saint-Sulpice; there were cracks in the glass letting in currents of air; the archbishop's nephews and the younger sons of nobles predestined for Church dignities had introduced into it the laxity and liberties which were then the privileges of the episcopacy.