La Flèche

It was during his three years residence in that country from 1734 to 1737 that the Treatise of Human Nature was composed.

After a brief stay in Paris, he spent some months in the ancient town of Reims, then took up his abode for two years at La Flèche, where was the Jesuits College at which a century and a quarter earlier the philosopher Descartes had been educated.

In these retreats, Hume passed his days, quote, "very agreeably", end quote, but as one gathers from a letter to his friend Ramsay, filled with acute remarks on the contrast of French and English manners, also very observantly.

A feature of some interest in this French sojourn is its bearing on the future essay on miracles.

When Hume passed through Paris, the city was still stirred on the subject of the alleged miracles at the tomb of the Abbé de Paris, which two years before, 1732, had caused great commotion and had been the subject of prolonged investigation and debate.

These miracles, readers of the essay will remember, furnished Hume with not the least serviceable part of his material for his argument.

Then, as he himself relates in a letter to Principal Campbell, it was while at La Flèche during a walk with a Jesuit in the cloisters of the college that the idea of the argument itself was suggested to him.

Quote, "As my head was full", end quote, he says, quote, "of the topics of my Treatise of Human Nature, which I was at the time composing, this argument immediately occurred to me, and I thought it very much graveled my companion.

And here a little information must be given as to the primitive administration of this institution, originally half military and half monastic, to explain the new life which there awaited Lambert.

Before the Revolution, the Oratorians, devoted like the Society of Jesus to the education of youth, succeeding the Jesuits, in fact, in certain of their establishments, the colleges of Vendôme, of Tournon, of La Flèche, Pont-le-Voy, Cérez, and Joly.

That at Vendôme, like the others, I believe, turned out a certain number of cadets for the army.

The abolition of educational bodies decreed by the Convention had but little effect on the college at Vendôme.

But because of his family's high status, when he was 10, he was said to be educated at what was arguably the most elite school in all of Europe at the time.

The Jesuit College of La Fleche.

Yes, La Fleche.

And La Flesche was no ordinary preparatory school.

I mean, it was the absolute pinnacle of the European educational establishment.