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Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1987 (1987)

Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1987

(1987)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

[Nr. 73/74]

U. Janssens-Knorsch
‘Virtuous hearts and critical minds’*
The progressive ideals of an eighteenth-century governess, Marie le Prince de Beaumont (1711-1780)

In 1984 P.J. Buijnsters published a pioneering article about the social position of governors and governesses in eighteenth-century Holland.1.** His investigation, hampered by the virtual absence of any quantitative data in Dutch archives and forced, therefore, to rely on a small collection of contemporary documents on the situation, led Buijnsters tentatively to conclude that the social position of this so familiar and ubiquitous type of private educator, was and remained completely undefined throughout the whole period of its existence. The governor's rôle in the home was, in fact, not only oscillating between the two extremes of (in the ideal case) the parent's equal and (in the worst) the rank of domestic servant, but it was also by its very nature of being ill-defined, a rôle that invited contempt and eventual loss of self-respect by those that held it.

It was, according to Buijnsters, probably the peculiar constellation of eighteenth-century Dutch society itself - slowly shifting from an aristocratically ruled to a more democratically orientated bourgeois society - which provided the primary reason for the indeterminately fluctuating position of the governor throughout the century, and which ultimately caused his disappearance from the scene at the end of it. This latter consequence, Buijnsters' article emphasizes, applied in particular to the governor but not to the governess. The governess, because of her exclusive concern with female education, played a slightly different rôle from the start and, because of the very slow development of an alternative form of education for girls, was able to maintain her function as private educator much longer than her male colleague.2.

As P.J. Buijnsters' article focussed mainly on the governor, and only cursorily touched upon the position of the governess, the present

investigation, concerned exclusively with a governess, is intended to complement and colour the picture he has drawn so far.

The eighteenth-century encyclopedia of Egbert Buys, Nieuw en volkomen woordenboek van Konsten en Wetenschappen (1778), referred to by Buijnsters, states under the heading of ‘governess’ or opvoedings-voogdes, that such a person:

is iemand aan welke de Opvoeding van Jonge Juffers aanbevolen is. Dezelve zal wegens de schikking van haar onderwijs en het behandelen haaren Eleves, een volkomene onderrigting kunnen erlangen, in de genoeg bekende en tevens ook vertaalde Werkjes van Madame Le Prince de Beaumont, onder de tytels van Magasin des Adolescens, Magasin des Enfans, etc. Het zal der Ouderen pligt zijn om daartoe een Mensch te verkiesen, die verstands en deugds genoeg bezit, om zoo wel haar eigen hart als dat haarer Eleves, naar de voorschriften van die Werkjes te vormen.’3.

What is especially interesting here is not only that Buys solely recommends the works of one Marie Le Prince de Beaumont as an authority on what a governess ought to teach her pupils, but that he recommends her books also as a moral and practical guide for the governesses themselves.

Governesses, like governors, so we learn from the literature of the time4., were in the first place responsible for the moral upbringing of the children in their trust and only in the second place for their intellectual instruction. As regards the latter, there was a marked difference between boys and girls. Both were to be taught knowledge of the Bible and the catechism, French, of course, good manners, dancing, and a little history and geography as well as rudimentary mathematics. But anything above that, like Latin and Greek, natural sciences, philosophy and sometimes law, was exclusively reserved for boys. Even history and geography were seldom a must for girls, so that their education was in most cases limited to manners and morals, the Bible and French. The more stringent intellectual training, as it was demanded for boys, was generally replaced by the acquisition for girls of the so-called social graces, like music, drawing, table-manners, dealing with servants, and needlework.5.

Women, after all, were only brought up to fulfill their rôle prescribed by society, which differed from that of men. All that society required of girls was that they should become good wives and good mothers and generally useful members of the Christian community. Learning in women was discouraged in the eighteenth century, and those that were learned had usually taught themselves, either in secret or by eaves-dropping on the lessons of their brothers. Learned ladies in Holland,

like the Bluestockings in England, were considered eccentric and impertinent. A woman, society stipulated, should possess no more and no less than all the social graces plus the mild retiring virtues of delicacy, timidity, softness and sensibility of heart.

Especially after the foundation of the Maatschappij tot Nut van 't Algemeen in the latter half of the eighteenth century, more pressure was put on the socializing element in female education to the detriment of intellectual instruction. ‘De opvoeder wordt een spreekbuis van het burgerlijk gemene best’, as Willem Frijhoff puts it in Onderwijs en Opvoeding.6. ‘Niet de kennisoverdracht maar de socialisering staat centraal. Het meisje komt als opvoedingsobject duidelijker voor het voetlicht, omdat het een meer eigen seksebepaalde sociale rol te vervullen krijgt.’7.

The function of the governess in the education of girls follows this trend in that she is more and more seen as a substitute mother. Based on the conviction that the child's happiness as well as the positive interest of society in law and order, depends on a strict religious upbringing, the ideal governess was supposed to be a perfect model of Christian virtue as well as a kind and loving, but strict mother-figure. Moreover, of course, the governess was expected to be well-educated and to speak and write perfect French. As P.J. Buijnsters already pointed out, governess that fulfilled these requirements were perhaps not too hard to be found among the first generation of Huguenot refugees at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but after that, when they had to be recruited from Switzerland, or worse, from protestant parts of Germany and from the second and third generation of French refugees, they usually came from the lower bourgeoisie and had no qualifications of refinement to speak of except speaking French.8.

In this, governesses differed greatly from their male colleagues, who had some formation, as they very often were impoverished theological candidates or unsuccessful law-students, who at least knew Latin and had some general knowledge of books. But as regards pedagogical training or simply talent, this necessary qualification governors had perhaps even less than governesses.

In 1753 a very handy textbook for the private educator, entitled Education Complète, was published in London9., the preface of which opened with the following characteristic statement:

De tous les arts, le plus nécessaire, le plus noble, le plus mal exercé, le plus méprisé, est celui d'éduquer les jeunes gens. Cet art est devenu la profession de tous ceux qui n'en ont point; la resource des autres à qui leur incapacité ne permettoit pas de penser à faire autre chose... Un jeune homme, destiné à une profession qui demande un travail pénible, veut-il s'en exempter, il se fait gouver-

neur... Une fille de famille qui croiroit se deshonorer en s'applicant au travail... se donne hardiment pour gouvernante: comme si dans tous ces cas il suffisoit de se determiner à cette profession, pour acquerir les talens nécessaires pour l'exercer. Presque tous entrent dans cet emploi avec une incapacité totale, des vues basses, un dégoût formel.

The same book, which incidentally was written by a woman, also carried the announcement that the author, animated by a great vocational zeal for teaching, offered to open a school for governesses.10. This dedicated pedagogue, whose books and magazines were to have an incalculable influence on the education of girls and young women in Holland and all over Europe, was no other than the very Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, whose magazines Egbert Buys's Encyclopedia of 1778 recommends as the best guide books to all those who started out in the governing profession.

Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (1711-1780), who began her career as a governess in London in 1747, made out of a necessity - i.e. the total absence of any form of professional training in England - a virtue. She not only devoted herself to becoming a perfect governess herself, but she published the fruits of her pedagogical experience and her actual teaching-knowledge in several handy books in order to teach others too to become good governesses and thereby to raise the standard of education for women in general.

Marie Le Prince de Beaumont was a born teacher, who felt a true vocation for the profession, as she herself said repeatedly in the prefaces to her various magazines.11. But she was by no means a theoretician; she was a practical woman and a mother herself; she was neither a dried-up spinster or a typical school-mistress, but a woman of the world, who knew the world and who had a very keen sense of what women needed in this world. By birth she came from a very respectable family of artisans in Rouen. Her father was a sculptor of boiseries and her three brothers became painters of some renown12.; together with her sister, Marie Le Prince at the age of fourteen was sent to the conventschool of Ernemont, which specialized in training teachers for the petites écoles, as the free schools for the children of the poor were called in France.13.

She received a good education at the convent, but it seems that there was some pressure on her to take her vows, so that she made a secret escape at the age of twenty-four; a fact she alludes to in two of her novels and in a letter.14. After disappearing from the convent, she earned a scanty living as a teacher, but she also had other means of maintaining herself. For she had a lovely voice and apparently sang

at the court of the retired King Stanislas of Poland in Lunéville, near Nancy, and for some time she also seems to have been on the stage.15. In 1743, at the age of thirty-two, she married at Lunéville a dissolute French nobleman of the name of de Beaumont, whom she got rid of again after two years, however, on the grounds that ‘this union would only have produced children afflicted with the most awful infirmities, and that God would not consider divorce a crime in such circumstances.’ She also had a lover called Malthen or Malther, of whom she had a daughter in 1745. According to a police-report of 1751, she came to Paris in that year ‘to claim a daughter of six years at the Foundling Hospital’, whom she took to England in September of that year.16.

She first went to England in 1747, but she also spent some time in Holland, where she is said to have passed herself for dead;17. a fact I have been unable to ascertain so far. She published a first novel, Le Triomphe de la Vérité in 1748, which was printed in Nancy and was dedicated to King Stanislas, whose patronage she either tried to gain or perhaps enjoyed already. Whatever it was, she cannot have seen much future there for she remained in London, where she earned a living as a governess and where she continued to write.

In 1750 she published Lettres diverses et critiques, a commentary on education with advice to parents and teachers, and she began a newspaper entitled Le Nouveau Magasin Français which appeared once a month, with the subtitle ‘Bibliothèque instructive et amusante’. Along the lines of the Spectator, it did not provide news, but contained essays, editorial reflections, readers' letters, poems and serialized novels written by herself. Run entirely by her alone, the Nouveau Magasin Français has been called the first women's magazine, and because of a certain defiant tone used against men in some of the editorials, recent critics have called it the first feminist journal.18.

Mme Le Prince de Beaumont had great faith in the female mind, and her insistence on reason, debate, self-knowledge and self-discipline in women's education, as it comes across in the Noúveau Magasin Français and her other writings, shows that she was not so much concerned with woman's rôle in the family, but that she fully realized women's intellectual and social potential. Much like later reformers in the field of women's education, she did, of course, not question the social order; she knew that girls had to be brought up to fulfill their rôle prescribed by society; but she severely criticized the over-emphasis on the social accomplishments in girls' education.

Coming from France Mme de Beaumont was steeped in the educational ideas of Fénelon and that first great educator of women, Mme de Maintenon, both of whom knew that true virtue and sensibility of heart are the natural outcome of rational discrimination and intellectual

insight. If you leave a girl's mind ‘a vast empty space’, Fénelon had said, ‘instead of filling it with solid matters, frivolous and impertinent ones will take their place’19.. If a girl was not to abandon herself to an idle and useless life, she must be trained to use her mind. Similar ideas had also been voiced by John Locke, but curiously enough, Locke's ideas on female education did not take hold in Europe until much later, when they were re-introduced as it were from France through the philosophes and through Mary Wollstonecraft.

Both Locke and Fénelon had advocated a method of teaching young children which would turn lessons into a pleasant game and so condition the pupil into an unconscious desire to learn more, which was the method put into practice by Mme de Maintenon in Saint-Cyr, to be imitated in convent-schools all over France.20. This was the method which Mme de Beaumont had learnt and was herself to employ as a governess, and this, too, was the method she advocated in her educational magazines, which she published from 1757 onwards. They were nothing if not entertaining.

The success of her three consecutive teaching courses, entitled Magasin des Enfans (1757), Magasin des Adolescents (1760) and Magasin des Jeunes Demoiselles (1764), was instantaneous and universal. Like the earlier Education Complète, they were almost simultaneously published in many European countries and in 1757 already the first English translation appeared. The first Dutch translation by Otto van Thol likewise appeared in 1757 to be followed by translations into all European languages including Russian and Greek. ‘Every governess,’ I quote from a recent Polish study, ‘who went abroad, had in her suitcase Mme de Beaumont's precious little volumes, which in a very simple but elegant French explained in a clear and methodical way, all the subjects with which a private educator was supposed to fill the heads of little girls and young women.’21.

The 12 little volumes in which the three magazines initially appeared, contained simplified old-testament stories, mythology, history, geography, many fairy-tales for her young pupils and moral tales for the older ones. Trying to avoid monotony by too much narrative text, Mme de Beaumont took over Fénelon's ingenious device of interposing her lessons with pedagogic dialogues, in which she herself - under the name of mademoiselle Bonne - engaged with her various pupils of differing ages, some of whom appeared under generic names, such as Lady Tempte, Lady Irascible, Lady Sensée, and so on. (The first Dutch translator made of these: Juff. de Wijs, juff. de Geest, juff. Beuzel, juff. Bulder etc.)

John Locke had suggested games by which children should be taught to read, and advised not to worry if they were slow in learning.



illustratie
Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (1711-1780) (From: Galerie des Dames Françaises distinguées dans les lettres et les arts. Paris 1843)




illustratie
Wij willen eerst eens stilstaan bij die groote en niet onbevallige Visschen, die er met hunne roode kieuwen zoo smakelijk uitzien; het zijn kabeljaauwen. I.D. bl. 407.




illustratie

One should indulge their curiosity by answering all their questions and as soon as they could read they were to be introduced to suitable story books such as Aesop's Fables, as a reward for their pains. Locke could think of no other books at the time, and feared there were no other good stories for children except dull primers and the Bible. As to the latter, he found the indiscriminate reading of the Scriptures no encouragement for children, because they could derive no pleasure from reading a book they could not understand.

Mme de Beaumont, although well-educated and intelligent was not a woman of outstanding scholarship, but she had imagination, a talent for writing, and a lot of human experience. Finding no proper readingmatter for her pupils, except the by then ubiquitous Gil Blas and Fénelon's Télémaque, both of which she found boring and unsuitable for girls, she used all her insight into the psyche of the child to write what young girls would read with pleasure and profit. ‘I am not only going to teach them French, which is what I am paid for,’ she said, ‘but I am going to use French to develop my pupils' minds and to form their character at the same time. I intend to give them a logical mind’ - ‘un esprit géométrique’, as she called it. In her dialogues she never tried to subjugate their little minds to hers but encouraged them to be critical. She always reasoned with her pupils, using the gentle art of persuasion to achieve her goals.

Although her pupils in England were all aristocratic girls, the ideals Mme de Beaumont passed on to them were enlightened and essentially middle-class. She taught social responsibility to family, servants and the poor; that beauty is less important than virtue, that no one person is better than another, and that all must work in their own way, according to their place in society. Her intellectual instruction was in the good old tradition of female up-bringing, not production-orientated (as it is today), in that it did not teach girls to be independent and earn their own living, but it gave them a good general education. Religion, of course, played its part, but it was not too obtrusive. The general moralizing of this age of transition from Christian to secular society allied itself easily with the rationalizing strain that came from Locke and Fénelon, to result in the enlightened maxim knowledge is virtue.22. We have to convince children of the necessity to practice what we teach them, Mme de Beaumont says in the preface of the Magasin des Enfans.

Nous avons pour cela deux moyens: la réligion et la raison: il ne faut jamais séparer ces deux choses & je me flatte de les avoir réunies dans le Magasin des Enfans.’

The idea to make teaching as enjoyable as possible, prompted Mme de Beaumont not only to rewrite Bible-stories, but also to incorporate

fairy-tales, some of which she took from Perrault; but she adapted and extensively rewrote them, and many she invented herself. Her fairytales, in fact, were perhaps what contributed most to the long-lasting popularity of her magazines. Especially in England, they fell in with and surpassed the rather insipid moral children's tales of the popular little chap-books brought out by Newbery just around that time, like Little Goody Two-shoes. ‘Babies do not want to read about babies,’ as Dr. Johnson so characteristically said of these, ‘they like to be told of giants and castles, and of something which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.’23.

The most famous of Mme de Beaumont's fairy-tales is The Beauty and the Beast. For this she has been duly praised, and interest in her revived when Jean Cocteau made his famous film La Belle et la Bête, based on her story. The film-critics at the time, it was in 1946, rediscovered not only the Magasin des Enfans, but they also discovered that Mme de Beaumont was in fact the great-grandmother of another great French story-teller, Prosper Mérimé.

The didactic use, especially for girls, of a fairy-tale like La Belle et la Bête is obvious: it demonstrates in an imaginatively convincing way, how La Belle with patience comes to see beauty of soul and mind within the ugly exterior of la Bête. Most of Mme de Beaumont's fairy-tale characters come in pairs like Prince Fatal et Prince Fortuné, Belotte et Laidronnette, Blanche et Vermeil and so on; the pair gently allegorizing extremes of character and behaviour. The moral theme, however, rarely obtrudes and the stories are brightened with a variety of objects and animals, keen observations of human behaviour and witty dialogue.

If one excepts Télémaque, which was written for the son of Louis the Fourteenth, the Magasin des Enfans marks the beginning of children's literature proper. It precedes Mme d'Epinay and Mme de Genlis in France, Sarah Trimmer in England, J. Hazeu, Petronella Moens and W.E. de Perponcher in Holland for many years.24.

The first Dutch translation of the Magasin des Enfans by Otto van Thol, appeared in The Hague, 1757-1758. It was extremely faithful to the original, and therefore a bit clumsy in style. The same author translated also the Magasin des Adolescentes (1760) and the Magasin des Jeunes Demoiselles (1764) and all three were brought out in 12 parts bound in six volumes, by Pierre Gosse in The Hague in 1777.25. They are to be found in many Dutch libraries and were widely used in Dutch education, be it private as suggested in the Encyclopedia quoted above, or in the many Franse dag- and kost-scholen that were founded in the course of the nineteenth century.

The best example of the influence of Mme Le Prince de Beaumont in Holland is perhaps Barbara van Meerten-Schilperoort (1777-1853),

that prototype of the early Dutch school-mistress. The wife of a protestant minister who was also school-commissioner, she had an early start in the education business, and after her husband's death ran a very successful Franse meisjes-kostschool in Gouda. Like Mme de Beaumont, Mevrouw van Meerten felt that she had a teacher's vocation, and like Mme de Beaumont she wrote many books, several of which were inspired by our French author. Her Magazijn voor Kinderen (1828), Magazijn voor Jonge Jufvrouwen (1829), and Magazijn voor Volwassene Meisjes (1830), are her own adaptations of the magazines of Mme de Beaumont, who had indeed encouraged future users to feel free to adapt them to their own purposes: ‘Je conjure ici les personnes chargées du soin de l'éducation de suppléer à ce qui manque à mon travail,’ Marie Le Prince de Beaumont writes, ‘qu'elles le refondent, qu'elles le traduisent, l'abrègent & le tournent...’26. In the Foreword of her adaptation of 1829, Mevr. van Meerten writes:

Onvergetelijk is ons soms de indruk van onze kinderjaren; zoo onvergetelijk was mij immer de indruk, welke op mij maakte de lezing van het Magazijn der Kinderen door Mevr. Le Prince de Beaumont. Het is bekend dat in dien tijd, in welke dit werkje verscheen, de voorraad van goede kinderboekjes nog zeer gering was. Geen wonder dus, dat alle kinderen dit magazijn, hetwelke zoo geheel voor hen geschikt was en door hen verstaan werd, als verslonden. Intusschen is dit boekje verdrongen door vele honderden, die na den tijd geschreven zijn, en van welke sommigen van vrij minder gehalte waren... Dit smartte mij zeer. Ik kwam op den inval Madame Bonne in een ander gewaad te steken; de snede van haar kleed wat te veranderen, en er een en ander, thans in de smaak zijnde sierraad bij te voegen...
Ik heb van Mevr. de Beaumont alles behouden wat mij goed voorkwam en hetwelk inderdaad niet gering is. Het een en ander heb ik veranderd; ik heb verschikt, weggelaten, bijgevoegd, omgewerkt...
Van de vele toovergeschiedenissen heb ik er slechts enkele uit behouden... De Bijbelsche Geschiedenis heb ik veel uitvoeriger behandelt... De Natuurlijke Historie, hier en daar verspreid, heb ik meer bijeen gebragt en eenigzins systematisch behandelt. De Plaatselijke Aardrijkskunde heb ik geheel weggelaten.
De twee volgende Deelen bevatten: Magazijn voor Jonge Jufvrouwen. De gesprekken met de oudste leerlingen worden hier allengs belangrijker. De zedekunde beslaat hier een groot vlak... Eenige leggen hare belijdenis af: weder eene gunstige aanleiding tot leering en besturing van het hart.

I think it will hardly be necessary to spell out the trend of Mevr. van Meer-

tens adaptions. Anybody who puts the eighteenth-century version next to her nineteenth-century adaptation, will see at a glance that all the fun and entertainment in the presentation, and even some of the subjects, disappear to be replaced by more religion and moral preaching in the calvinistic manner. A small example taken from the dialogue following the story of Cain and Abel may suffice to illustrate the transformation of Marie Le Prince de Beaumont's governess (madem. Bonne) into Barbara van Meerten-Schilperoort's Mevr. Belcour. (For the sake of the comparison I have taken the Dutch rendering of the original by Otto van Thol):

Het Magazyn der Kinderen, pp. 52-53 (Otto van Thol, 1757)
Het Magazijn voor Kinderen, pp. 78-79 (Mevr. van Meerten, 1828)
Juffer Charlotte. Charlotte.
Ik hebbe wel iets gedocht, ma Ach Mevrouw! ik durf niet. Gij
Bonne; maar ik durf het niet zeggen: 't zoudt mij verfoeijen en mij niet meer by
is te leelyk. u willen dulden.
Madem. Bonne.  
Ei kom, liefje; eene jonge Juffer, Mev. Belcour.
die haare gebreken durft bekennen, wil Wel mijn lieve Lotje! zou ik dan on-
zich gaarne beteren. barmhartiger zijn dan God, die den
Juffer. Charlotte. berouw hebbenden zondaar niet van
Wel nu, dan zal ik het zeggen; ik zich stoot? Kom, mijn kind! schep
ben zoo nydig als Kain op myne oudste moed. Ontsluit uw hart voor uwe beste
zuster; Papa en Mama houden meer van vriendin, en dan zullen wij te zamen aan
haar dan van my, en dat maakt my uwe verbetering arbeiden.
zomtyds zoo boos, dat ik haar wel dood  
zou slaan, als ik maar kon. Charlotte.
Madem. Bonne. Ach Mevrouw! ik ben even als Kaïn
Maar, myn arme schaap, is 't uw jaloersch omtrent mijne zuster. Mijn
eige schuld niet, dat zy uwe zuster liever ouders hebben haar liever dan mij, en
hebben dan u? Zeg my, bidde ik u, zoo dat maakt mij zoo boos op haar, dat ik
gy eene Mama waart, en twee dochters laatst, toen zij geprezen en ik gestraft
had; de eene was zoet, heusch, gehoor- werd, uitdrukkelijk wenschte, dat zij
zaam, en vlytig als zy haare meesters by dood ware, omdat zij mij dan de liefde
haar had; de ander hoofdig, stout, van Papa en Mama niet meer zou
moedwillig tegen al de waereld, en haare ontstelen.
meesters ongehoorzaam; van welke  
zoudt gy doch 't meeste houden? Mev. Belcour.
Juffer Charlotte. Ja wel is dat schrikkelijk! Arm
Wel, van de eerste. kind! weet gij wel dat gij door deze
Madem. Bonne. gedachte in Gods oog reeds een broe-
Dan moet gy 't uw Papa en Mama dermoord begaan hebt? want God kent
gantsch niet kwalyk neemen, dat zy uw en oordeelt zoo wel onze gezindheden
zuster liever hebben, dan u: word ook als onze daden.

zoo zoet als zy, en ik ben verzekerd dat  
zy u allertederst zullen beminnen. Charlotte.
Juffer Charlotte. Ja ik gevoel wel, hoe slecht in ben, en
Dat zal ik doen, ma Bonne, en ik dit maakt mij somtijds zoo radeloos, dat
beloove u dat ik alle dwaasheden die ik ik alle menschen, ja mij zelve haat; en
doen of zeggen zal, op zal schryven. van harte wenschte, dat ik maar dood
  ware.

But Mevr. van Meerten must not be judged too harshly, for she was part and product of the pietistic trend of her time. The ideal governess or schoolmistress, whose portrait she traces in the course of her magazines, completely corresponds to what Dutch society demanded of her at the time. Her Mevr. Belcour is indeed the good old mademoiselle Bonne of Marie Le Prince in a new dress: instead of a flouncy silk with liberal décolleté we now see a chaste dark wrapping with tight high collar. Madem. Bonne is motherly, loving, kind and a little worldly; Mevr. Belcour tries to be motherly, loving, and kind, but she comes across as stiff, pedantic, strict and preaching like a calvinist minister. This is how she presents herself to her pupils in one of the opening dialogues of the Magazijn voor Kinderen:

Mev. Belcour Nu lieve kinderen! spreekt vrij uit: gelooft gij, dat uwe ouders u alleen aan mij toevertrouwd hebben, omdat gij wat zoudt leeren?
Charlottte Neen, neen! dat weet ik wel beter. Mama heeft mij hier naar toe gezonden, om dat ik zoeter zou worden.
Mev. Belcour Dus komt gij niet alleen om wijzer, maar ook, en wel vooral, om beter te worden. Dit is de bestemming van ieder mensch op de aarde, van ieder kind in de school. Dit is het doel van de geheele opvoeding, en om dit oogmerk te bereiken, hebben Opvoeders en Opvoedelingen beiden pligten te betrachten. Wij zijn hier nu in een kleine Maatschappij bij een, en moeten trachten elkander onderling de uitoefening dier pligten aangenaam en gemakkelijk te maken. ... Niet gering, mijne kinderen! zijn de pligten, welke ik, door mij met de zorg voor uwe opvoeding en onderwijs te belasten op mij genomen heb. Ik ben daar door in eene zeer nauwe, bijna moederlijke betrekking tot u gekomen. Ik moet dus moederlijke pligten aan ul. uitoefenen: u als mijne kinderen beminnen, u allerlei nuttige en aangename kundigheden mededeelen, welke kunnen dienen om uw ver-

stand te beschaven en uwen geest te versieren. Maar vooral moet ik pogen u te verbeteren van uwe gebreken, uw karakter te vormen, u den Godsdienst beminnelijk en de deugd eerwaardig te maken.

Marie Le Prince de Beaumont had slightly different (perhaps one could say more enlightened) ambitions for her girls, which she states in the preface to the Magasin des Enfans. There will be criticism of her teaching, she expects, especially by men:

(ils) trouveront que j'ai tort de parler aux enfans de choses qu'ils supposeront au dessus de leur portée; de choses qu'ils prétendent que les femmes mêmes doivent toujours ignorer...
On diroit que vous prétendiez en faire des Logiciennes, des Philosophes; & vous en feriez volontiers des automates, leur répondraije. Oui, Messrs. les tyrans, j'ai dessein de les tirer de cette ignorance crasse, à laquelle vous les avez condamnées. Certainement, j'ai dessein d'en faire des Logiciennes, des Géomètres & même des Philosophes. Je veux leur apprendre à penser, à penser juste, pour parvenir à bien vivre...’ (p. xix).

This defiant and decidedly feminist tone, however, is more the tone of Mme de Beaumont's earlier Nouveau Magasin Français (1750-52) than that of the governess in her Magasins. While the Nouveau Magasin Français is characterized as quite outspoken on the women's question27., the magazines for girls, and that for Jeunes Demoiselles in particular, written for marriageable girls between fifteen and eighteen years, counsels them to be aimiable, virtuous and forbearing. It confirms what I hinted at earlier: Mme de Beaumont, though concerned about the waste of women's intelligence, had in fact no illusions about women's lot in the society of her day. Her own experiences and a good amount of realistic thinking led her to accept the reigning conservative and essentially middle-class view of society, yet she continued in publicly expressing her ideals for women, and putting her ideas on intellectual training for girls, alongside of their moral education, into practice. In the seventeeneighties and nineties much was was written on women's education by Hannah More, Hester Chapone, and Priscilla Wakefield, but it was almost half a century later that Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) seriously attempted to reassess the rôle of women in society.28.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft after her, Marie Le Prince de Beaumont knew and had experienced the trials and humiliations of a woman forced through circumstances to earn her own living as a private governess. And like many of her sort all over Europe, she suffered from the low

esteem in which governesses were held nearly everywhere. Especially in the England of her day, governesses never ranked higher than domestic servants. Such a low position, Mme de Beaumont logically argued, must necessarily give children a very low opinion of learning and of those who possess it:

Mes talens ne sont pas de ceux qui conduisent nécessairement aux marques extérieures de la considération en Angleterre... cette conduite empêche un grand nombre de personnes de cultiver les talens qu'elles ont pour l'éducation. Elles craignent le mépris attaché à cette profession... Elles voient d'un côté l'humble gouvernante, reléguée à la seconde table, condamnée à manger avec le valet de chambre de Milord qui étoit laquais il y a trois jours, pendant que l'actrice brilliante est applaudie & admise à la table des maitres.’29.

Mevr. van Meerten-Schilperoort, 80 years later, obviously still suffered from the same social discrimination of governesses in Holland, otherwise she would not have incorporated the following little scene into her Magazijn voor Kinderen, which speaks for itself:

Auguste Zij (Mevr. Belcour) moest het eens durven ondernemen, om een hand aan Freule Clara te slaan. Het is een ondeugend kind, maar ik zal niet dulden dat zij haar aanraakt. En ik zal mij ook niet aan haar onderwerpen.
Constance Maar bedenk toch dat uwe moeder u geheel aan hare bescheidenheid heeft overgegeven, bedenk hoe verdrietig uw leven zal zijn, daar gij anders zoo veel genoegen kondt hebben. Ik leide het gelukkigste leven van de wereld.
Auguste Ja, al heel gelukkig: den geheelen dag den zin te doen van eene bediende, van een gemeen mensch.
Constance Auguste! schaamt gij u niet. Hoe komt gij er aan? Mevrouw Belcour eene bediende?... Dat moest Mama eens hooren! Mevrouw Belcour is eene vrouw van zeer fatsoenlijke afkomst, wier man een aanzienlijken post bekleed heeft en die in ons huis even zeer ontzien, geacht en gehoorzaamd wordt, als Mama zelve, wier grootste vriendin zij is. Het is waar: ik tracht altijd haren wil te doen; maar ik weet dat die wil mijn geluk bedoelt, en ik zelve zou niets anders willen. Maar daar luidt de klok; kom Clara gaat gij dan mede?30.

If one looks at the situation of the governess in other European countries one finds much the same picture. Governesses, perhaps even more than their male colleagues, were relegated to the status of domestic servant. The more serious and professional they were, the greater their humilia-

tion and frustration at being condemned by a still fairly rigid social system to ‘a dog's life’.31. Numerous are the testimonies to this in the correspondence of the time. Letters from governesses and governors alike, in England, Holland, Northern Germany, Scandinavia, Poland and Russia to be found in the extensive Formey-collection at Berlin32., echo the general plight of private educators. What emerges is the picture of a social group that was less concerned about the remuneration of its services than about the preservation of its personal dignity and its status in society. A governess like Louise Deyverdun, for instance, who in November 1760 appealed to Formey to find her a place, insists that she will accept even the lowest payment, provided her future employers ‘sachent mettre quelque différence entre une gouvernante et une servante’. ‘Des bâtards sociaux’ Henri Duranton has labelled these vaguely defined governors and governesses, whose very elusiveness is the main characteristic of their possible definition as a social group.33. Neither accepted by the class who employed them, nor part of the milieu ‘des gens de lettres,’ they formed a sort of intellectual proletariat of bad repute and insecure existence.

One of the few exceptions among governesses, a woman who mastered this sad fate, and who successfully survived in her works, was Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. That the ideal governess she depicts in her Magasins was not a total fiction but a living reality may be seen in the fact that in 1771 her former English pupils united to travel to her retreat in the south of France in order to pay their mademoiselle Bonne a surprise visit on her sixtieth birthday.


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