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that neither my father nor my mother, nor manservant, nor maidservant should utter in my presence any thing except those Latin words that each of them had learned in order to talk blunderingly^[1] with me. It was wonderful how much they all profited by this: my father and my mother thus learned enough Latin to understand it, and acquired the language sufficiently to use it at need, as did also the other members of the household most in attendance on me. In fact, we were so latinised that it overflowed to our neighbouring villages, where there are still divers Latin names, which have taken root by usage, for craftsmen and for tools. As for me, I was more than six years old before I understood French or Perigordin any more than Arabic; and without system, without books, without grammar or rules, without whipping and without tears, I had learned as pure Latin as my schoolmaster knew, for I could not have adulterated or changed it. If by way of test they desired to give me an exercise in composition after the fashion in colleges, given there in French,^[2] to me they must needs give it in bad Latin, to be turned into good. And Nicolas Groucchi, who wrote De comitiis Romanorum, Guillaume Gerente, who commented Aristotle, George Buchanan, the great Scotch poet, (b) and Marc-Antoine Muret, (c) whom France and Italy recognise as the greatest orator of our day, (a) who were my private tutors, have often told me that in my childhood I was so ready and so at ease in that language, that they themselves were shy in familiar talk with me. Buchanan, whom I met afterwards in the suite of the late maréchal de Brissac, told me that he was writing on the education of children, and that he was taking mine for a model; for he then had in his charge that comte de Brissac who showed himself later to be so courageous and gallant.^[3]

As for Greek, of which I have scarcely any knowledge at all, my father proposed to have it taught me artificially but in a novel way, in the guise of pastime and exercise: we tossed our declensions to and fro after the fashion of those who learn arithmetic and geometry by certain table-games.