From the retirement of such secluded life, she sometimes perceived the higher world which shone above her.  The lights which displayed to her this great world offended, more than they dazzled, her sight.  The pride of this aristocratic society, which saw without valuing her, weighed on her sensitive mind—­a society in which her position was not assigned to her, seemed badly framed.  It was less envy than justice that revolted in her.  Superior beings have their places marked out by nature, and every thing that keeps them from occupying them, seems to them an usurpation.  They find society frequently the reverse of nature, and take their revenge by despising it:  from this arises the hatred of genius against power.  Genius dreams of an order of things, in which the ranks should be marked out by nature and virtue; whilst in reality they are almost always derived from birth—­that blind allotment of fate.  There are few great minds which do not feel in their earliest progress the persecution of fortune, and who do not begin by an internal revolt against society.  They are only quieted by their own discouragement.  Some are resigned from a more lofty feeling to the place which God assigns to them.  To put up with the world humbly is still more beautiful than to control it.  This is the very acme of virtue.  Religion leads to it in a day; philosophy only conducts to it by a lengthened life, misery, or death.  These are days when the most elevated place in the world is a scaffold.

VII.

The young maiden once conducted by her grandmother to an aristocratic house, of which her humble parents were free, was deeply hurt at the tone of condescending superiority with which her grandmother and herself were treated.  “My pride took alarm,” she writes, “my blood boiled more than usual, and I blushed violently.  I no longer inquired of myself why this lady was seated on a sofa, and my grandmother on a low stool; but my feelings led to such reflection, and I saw the end of the visit with satisfaction as if a weight was taken off my mind.”

Another time she was taken to pass eight days at Versailles, in the palace of that king and queen whose throne she was one day to sap.  Lodged in the attics with one of the female domestics of the Chateau, she was a close observer of this royal luxury, which she believed was paid for by the misery of the people, and that grandeur of things founded on the servility of courtiers.  The lavishly spread tables, the walks, the play, presentations—­all passed before her eyes in the pomp and vanity of the world.  These ceremonious details of power were repugnant to her mind, which fed on philosophy, truth, liberty, and the virtue of the olden time.  The obscure names, the humble attire, of the relatives who took her to see all this, only procured for her mere passing looks and a few words, which meant more protection than favour.  The feeling that her youth, beauty,