The defects of his own mind were reflected in the education which he imparted.  He was not sufficiently rational or scientific.  It might have been thought that his two hundred pupils were all destined to be poets, writers, and orators.  He set little value on learning without talent.  This was made very clear at the entrance of the Nicolaites to St. Sulpice, where talent was held of no account, and where scholasticism and erudition alone were prized.  When it came to a question of doing an exercise of logic or philosophy in barbarous Latin, the students of St. Nicholas, who had been fed upon more delicate literature, could not stomach such coarse food.  They were not, therefore, much liked at St. Sulpice, to which M. Dupanloup, was never appointed, as he was considered to be too little of a theologian.  When an ex-student of St. Nicholas ventured to speak of his former school, the old tutors would remark:  “Oh, yes! in the time of M. Bourdoise,” as much as to say that the seventeenth century was the period during which this establishment achieved its celebrity.

Whatever its shortcomings in some respects, the education given at St. Nicholas was of a very high literary standard.  Clerical education has this superiority over a university education, that it is absolutely independent in everything which does not relate to religion.  Literature is discussed under all its aspects, and the yoke of classical dogma sits much more lightly.  This is how it was that Lamartine, whose education and training were altogether clerical, was far more intelligent than any university man; and when this is followed by philosophical emancipation, the result is a very frank and unbiased mind.  I completed my classical education without having read Voltaire, but I knew the Soirees de St. Petersbourg by heart, and its style, the defects of which I did not discover until much later, had a very stimulating effect upon me.

The discussions on romanticism, then so fierce in the world outside, found their way into the college and all our talk was of Lamartine and Victor Hugo.  The superior joined in with them, and for nearly a year they were the sole topic of our spiritual readings.  M. Dupanloup did not go all the way with the champions of romanticism, but he was much more with them than against them.  Thus it was that I came to know of the struggles of the day.  Later still, the solvuntur objecta of the theologians enabled me to attain liberty of thought.  The thorough good faith of the ancient ecclesiastical teaching consisted in not dissimulating the force of any objection, and as the answers were generally very weak, a clever person could work out the truth for himself.