At Port-Royal the number of boarders was never over fifty at one time."-- "Before 1764, most of the colleges were day-schools with from 15 to 80 pupils," besides the scholarships.

and peasant boarders, not very numerous.--"An army of boarders, comprising more than one half of our bourgeois class, under a drill regulated and overlooked by the State, buildings holding from seven to eight hundred boarders--such is what one would vainly try to find anywhere else, and which is essentially peculiar to contemporary France."] [Footnote 6351: Breal, ibid., 287, id., "Excursions pedagogiques," p.
10.

"I took part (with these pupils) in a supper full of gayety in the room of the celebrated Latinist, Corssen, and I remember the thought that passed through my mind when recurring to the meal we silently partook of at Metz, two hundred of us, under the eye of the censor and general superintendent, and menaced with punishment, in our cold, monastic refectory."] [Footnote 6352: Even though Taine had visited Eton and other English schools, he appears to have a somewhat rosy picture of life inside these institutions.

I have been 9 years to a similar school and can assure the reader that the headmaster's wife is no suitable substitute for a real mother and her table does not replace one's own home.

The rector of my school once stated that boarding schools should only be resorted to when one could not remain at home.