An acquaintance which one of her uncles, who was an ecclesiastic, had with an upper servant of the royal household, enabled her to spend some days at the palace of Versailles.  She was lodged with the servants, and enjoyed the servant’s privilege of seeing every thing and sparing nothing.  Royalty was never put in the focus of eyes so critical.  Her comments upon this visit are very brief.  She expresses her detestation of what she saw, saying, “It gives me the feeling of injustice, and obliges me every moment to contemplate absurdity.”

The studies and experiences which have been described bring us to her fifteenth year.  She was then a beautiful woman.  In her memoirs she declines to state how she looked when a child, saying that she knows a better time for such a sketch.  In describing herself at fifteen, she says:  “I was five feet four inches tall; my leg was shapely; my hips high and prominent; my chest broad and nobly decorated; my shoulders flat; ... my face had nothing striking in it except a great deal of color, and much softness and expression; my mouth is a little too wide—­you may see prettier every day—­but you will see none with a smile more tender and engaging; my eyes are not very large; the color of the iris is hazel; my hair is dark brown; my nose gave me some uneasiness; I thought it a little too flat at the end....  It is only since my beauty has faded that I have known what it has been in its bloom.  I was then unconscious of its value, which was probably augmented by my ignorance.”

That she understated her personal charms, the concurrent admiration of contemporary men and women fully attests.  Her physical beauty was marvelous, and when great men were subjected to its influence, to the imperial functions of her intellect, and to the persuasions of an organization exceedingly spiritual and magnetic, it is no wonder that her influence, domestic woman, housewife, as she always was, became so effectual over them.

Let me here warn my hearers not to forestall this woman in their judgments.  She was not a manlike female.  No better wife ever guided her husband anonymously by her intuitions, or assisted him by her learning.  In the farm house and in the palace she was as wifely and retiring as any of the excellent women who have been the wives of American statesmen.  Every one knew her abilities and her stupendous acquirements, and she felt them herself, but, notwithstanding, she never would consent to write a line for publication and avow it as her own, and never did, until that time when her husband was an outlaw, when her child was torn from her, when she herself stood in the shadow of the guillotine, and writhed under the foulest written and spoken calumnies that can torture outraged womanhood into eloquence.  She then wrote, in twenty-six days, her immortal Appeal to Posterity, and those stirring letters and papers incident to her defense, from which some extracts have been here presented.