You have thoroughly explained to me the greatest part of my doubts. All your designs are excellent, and your method of teaching is certainly preferable to the common one. But it is necessary, according to your plan, that mothers should be capable of directing the different masters: where will you find such mothers? Where is the woman who, like you, has passed her life in cultivating her talents for instruction, that she may be useful to her children? Besides, if all mothers thought as you do, there would be an end of all society; shut up in their chambers, with masters instructing them, or flying away to their country-houses, they would be lost to the world, and Paris would become a desart. I interest myself much in your fame, but I do not wish you to succeed in making this reform. Joking apart, I have a remark to make to you. You prevent your children, till the age of thirteen, from reading Telemachus, Fontaine's Fables, and all such books; yet you would inspire them with a taste for reading! What books then would you give them instead of those I have mentioned? Are they only to read the Arabian Nights, and Fairy Tales, till they are thirteen? Do they learn nothing by heart? I have often heard you say it was impossible to understand the harmony or sounds of Poetry if the ear is not accustomed to it from infancy. Be so good to answer me this. I write to you in great haste, as I am going immediately into the country I am waited for, and hurried. Adieu, my dear friend! Madame d’ Ostalis’ pregnancy is no longer doubted. I saw her husband yesterday, who told me she bears it with the best grace in the world, which was more pleasing to him, as he did not expect it. Farewell, my love. You take no journeys, therefore never write me such vile short letters as this is.