history, philosophy, music, painting, dancing, the exact sciences, chemistry, foreign tongues and learned languages, she learned all and desired more.  She herself formed her ideas from all the rays which the obscurity of her condition allowed to penetrate into the laboratory of her father.  She even secreted the books which the young apprentices brought and forgot for her in the workshop.  Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and the English philosophers, fell into her hands; but her real food was Plutarch.

“I shall never forget,” she said, “the Lent of 1763, during which I every day carried that book to church, instead of the book of prayers:  it was from this moment that I date the impressions and ideas which made me republican, when I had never formed a thought on the subject.”  After Plutarch, Fenelon made the deepest impression upon her.  Tasso and the poets followed.  Heroism, virtue, and love were destined to pour from their three vases at once into the soul of a woman destined to this triple palpitation of grand impressions.

In the midst of this fire in her soul her reason remained calm, and her purity spotless.  She scarcely owns to the slightest and fugitive emotions of the heart and senses.  “When as I read behind the screen which closed up my chamber from my father’s apartment,” she writes, “my breathing was at all loud, I felt a burning blush overspread my cheek, and my altered voice would have betrayed my agitation.  I was Eucharis to Telemachus, and Herminia to Tancred.  Yet, transformed as I was into them, I never thought myself of becoming anything to any body.  I made no reflection that individually affected me; I sought nothing around me:  it was a dream without awaking.  Yet I remember having beheld with much agitation a young painter named Taboral, who called on my father occasionally.  He was about twenty years of age, with a sweet voice, intelligent countenance, and blushed like a girl.  When I heard him in the atelier, I had always a pencil or something to look after; but as his presence embarrassed as much as it pleased me, I went away quicker than I entered, with a palpitating heart, a tremor that made me run and hide myself in my little room.”

Although her mother was very pious, she did not forbid her daughter from reading.  She wished to inspire her with religion, and not enforce it upon her.  Full of good sense and toleration, she left her with confidence to her reason, and sought neither to repress nor dry up the sap which would hereafter produce its fruit in her heart.  A servile, not voluntary religion, appeared to her degradation and slavery which God could not accept as a tribute worthy of him.  The pensive mind of her daughter naturally tended towards the great objects of eternal happiness or misery, and she was sure, at an earlier age than any other, to plunge deeply into their mysteries.  The reign of sentiment began in her through the love of God.  The sublime delirium of her pious contemplations