Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/588

574 are in England men who have a right to laugh at us." But she enlivened this reading by also devouring all the tales, and romances, and travels of that period; not excepting the very freest of the books of Scarron and Voltaire. But Plutarch was her great book, and from him she derived her admiration of great men, or such as appeared to her great men, and her decided republican principle.

"I shall never forget," she writes, "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 a republican, when I had never formed a thought on the subject." She was, in fact, only nine years of age at this time. After Plutarch, Fenelon made the deepest impression upon her. Tasso and the poets followed. Thus she grew up, and it may be supposed that her secluded sort of life and her manners would have tended to soften a heart that early philosophy had attempted to indurate. She says, "When I read behind the screen which closed up my chamber from my father's apartment, if my breathing was at all loud, I felt a burning blush over-spread 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 of becoming anything to anybody. I made no reflection that individually I was 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."

To improve her education, she went for a time into a convent; she then returned to her father's house, near the Pout Neuf, with views from its roof looking over the Champs Elysees and the houses of Chaillot. She thought the district of the Isle Saint Louis then very beautiful, and, with her mother and her aunt Angelique, inhaled the fresh air with them on summer evenings on those straight quays, watching the course of the graceful river and the distant landscape. In the daytime she accompanied her mother to market, and employed herself in the duties of the kitchen. Sometimes she was taken into more aristocratic circles, and there she felt at once the pain and indignation resulting from the rude contrast betwixt the ideal world which her imagination had indulged and the real one. She was deeply wounded by the manner in which she and her mother or aunt were