Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/52

 j4 WORKMEN AND HEROES beauty of both parents, with the rectitude and high ideals of the mother. But there lies no explanation of inheritance from either father or mother to make us understand how the child of these common people became at nine years of age a student of Plutarch, Tasso, and Voltaire, and a philosopher at the age of eleven. It requires a deeper law than that of heredity to explain these things. At ten, Manon developed a strongly religious tendency, which was fosterer, no doubt, by daily studying the " Lives of the Saints." While reading the ac- counts of martyrs who had died at the stake rather than resign their faith, the child often regretted that she had not lived in those " good old days," so happy a thing it seemed to her to die for one's principles. This privilege was granted her in after-years, strangely enough ; and she proved as courageous in reality as she had in childhood imagined herself capable of being under similar circum- stances. Manon's religious feelings were culminated by a request made to her mother, in a paroxysm of tears, that she might be placed in a convent to prepare herself for her first communion ; accordingly, she was taken to the Convent of the " Sis- ters of the Congregation " in May, 1 765, when she was eleven years old. Side by side with this nunnery, where the precocious child passed one of the happiest epochs of her life, stood the prison which was to immure her in later years. Should such a circumstance and situation be unfolded in the pages of fiction, we would call it Strained and unnatural. During the year Manon passed in the convent, she made the acquaintance of two sisters, Henrietta and Sophie Cannet, who were allied to the nobility ; and she afterward attributed her facility in writing to the correspondence with the younger of these sisters, which continued without interruption over more than a decade of years. In her memoirs, written under the shadow of the guil- lotine, she says, "In the gloom of a prison, in the midst of political storms, how shall I recall to my mind, and how describe, the rapture, the tranquillity I enjoyed at that period ; but when I review the events of my life, I find it difficult to as- sign to circumstances that variety and that plenitude of affection which have so strongly marked every point of its duration, and left me so clear a remem- brance of every place at which I have been." After she left the convent, she found her passion for reading unabated, and as her father's library was limited, she was obliged to borrow and hire books ; from these she made copious extracts and abstracts which formed her valuable habit of reflection upon what she had read. Her first feelings of contempt and bitterness toward the aristocrats were roused by the air of condescension which the Cannets exhibited to her in her occasional visits to Sophie. They were stupid and arrogant people, but they made her realize that the daughter of an artisan was not on equal footing with people allied to the nobility, albeit she was a prodigy of beauty, learning, and talent, and they the dullest of beings. " I endeavored," she says, " to think with hope that everything was right, but my pride told me things were ordered better in a republic." So, as early as at