Saint-Cyr Girls' School

Saint-Cyr Girls' School enters the narrative as a place where young women shared knowledge of court life. For Marie-Josèphe de la Croix, the young ladies there helped bridge the distance between five years in a convent and the customs she later encountered at court.

Setting and Presence in the Narrative

Marie-Josèphe invokes the young ladies at Saint-Cyr when asked how she acquired an opinion about Lucien de Chrétien's attire. She explains that she had spent the previous five years in a convent, where fashion had not been a concern, and identifies those girls as her source of information. The account establishes Saint-Cyr through their conversations rather than through descriptions of its administration or formal teaching.

Religious and Courtly Conversation

The young ladies' talk ranged between religion and worldly affairs. Religion was their usual subject, Marie-Josèphe indicates, but they also spoke of court, Louis XIV, and each new style. Their knowledge therefore reached beyond the convent's immediate setting: fashion and courtly behavior circulated among the girls through conversation.

Contribution to Marie-Josèphe's Knowledge

That informal education gives Marie-Josèphe a basis for interpreting clothing and court custom despite her recent convent life. She can relay a reported rule about which young officers should wear mustaches, tie their hair, and loosen their cravats, then apply it—wryly—to Lucien de Chrétien. Saint-Cyr's limited but distinct narrative role is to show how young women's shared conversation supplied practical knowledge that formal religious life had not.