In old France indeed the conditions seem similar to those in England. The
great serio-comic novel of Antoine de la Salle, _Petit Jean de Saintré_,
shows us in detail the education and the adventures, which certainly
involved a very early introduction to life, of a page in a great house in
the fifteenth century. We must not take everything in this fine comedy too
solemnly, but in the fourteenth century _Book of the Knight of the
Tour-Landry_ we may be sure that we have at its best the then prevailing
view of the relation of a father to his tenderly loved daughters. Of
harshness and rigour in the relationship it is not easy to find traces in
this lengthy and elaborate book of paternal counsels. But it is clear that
the father takes seriously the right of a daughter to govern herself and
to decide for herself between right and wrong. It is his object, he tells
his girls, "to enable them to govern themselves." In this task he assumes
that they are entitled to full knowledge, and we feel that he is not
instructing them in the mysteries of that knowledge; he is taking for
granted, in the advice he gives and the stories he tells them, that his
"young and small daughters, not, poor things, overburdened with
experience," already possess the most precise knowledge of the intimate
facts of life, and that he may tell them, without turning a hair, the most
outrageous incidents of debauchery. Life already lies naked before them:
that he assumes; he is not imparting knowledge, he is giving good
counsel.[3]

[3] If the Knight went to an extreme in his assumption of his daughters'
knowledge, modern fathers often go to the opposite and more foolish
extreme of assuming in their daughters an ignorance that would be
dangerous even if it really existed. In _A Young Girl's Diary_
(translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul), a work that is
highly instructive for parents, and ought to be painful for many, we
find the diarist noting at the age of thirteen that she and a girl