She mastered Clairaut’s geometry by copying the book, plates, and all, from beginning to end.  She read Pufendorf’s folio on the law of nature.  She learned English, and read the life of Cromwell.  She read the great French preachers, Bossuet, Flechier, Bourdaloue, and Massillon.  She was vexed by the terrorism of their arguments.  She thought that they overrated the importance of the devil.  She did not believe him to be as powerful as they feared.  She thought that they might teach oftener what seemed to her the potent element of Christian faith—­love—­and leave the devil out sometimes, and so she herself wrote a sermon on brotherly love, with which that personage had nothing to do, and in which his name was not even mentioned.  She also read the Protestant preachers—­Blair especially.  She entangled herself in the acute skepticism of Bayle.

She seemed possessed of one of those assimilative intellects which extract by glances the substance from a book as the flash of lightning demagnetizes the lodestone.  Her acquisitions were consequently immense.  Though very yielding in the grasp of the mighty thinkers whom she encountered, yet she read them in the spirit of criticism, controversy, and dissent.

She was, nevertheless, the farthest in the world from becoming a literary dragon.  All this did not impair the freshness of girlhood.  She was meek and pure.  Passages in her autobiography, which I can not repeat, yet which ought to be read, establish this.  She was throughout entirely domestic.  She did the marketing, cooked the food; nursed her mother; kept a sharp eye on the apprentices; nearly fell in love, for when the young painter, Taborel, who was twenty, and blushed like a girl, visited her father’s workshop, she always had a crayon or something else to seek there, but at the sight of him ran away trembling, without saying a word.

It was not difficult for her to be both scholar and housewife.  Writing in after years, of domestic cares, she says:  “I never could comprehend how the attention of a woman who possesses method and activity can be engrossed by them....  Nothing is wanting but a proper distribution of employments, and a small share of vigilance....  People who know how to employ themselves always find leisure moments, while those who do nothing are in want of time for any thing....  I think that a wife should keep the linen and clothes in order, or cause them to be so kept; nurse her children; give directions concerning the cookery, or superintend it herself, but without saying a word about it, and with such command of her temper, and such management of her time, as may leave her the means of talking of other matters, and of pleasing no less by her good humor than by the graces natural to her sex....  It is nearly the same in the government of states as of families.  Those famous housewives who are always expatiating on their labors are sure either to leave much in arrears, or to render themselves tiresome to every one around them; and, in like manner, those men in power so talkative and so full of business, only make a mighty bustle about the difficulties they are in because too awkward or ignorant to remove them.”