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Rh conscience obeyed to the extreme the dictates of education, she was indeed that; but later her reason and intellect grew strong enough to grapple with and overcome the mysteries of credulity: she could not and cared not to stifle the voice of her intellectual convictions, and bravely avowed them to the world. She who bore for her husband the heaviest burden of the cares of State; who instigated, urged, and upheld him in his most daring measures; who rose equal to all the strange and tragic emergencies which her daring leadership of the purest party of that troubled time thrust upon her; who kept herself and her good name pure and unblemished in the midst of a revolutionary whirl of corruption and general laxity of morals—this woman was not surely one to be either frightened or cajoled into acceptance of the bugbears of a popular belief.

Marie Jeanne Phlipon, born in Paris sometime in 1754, was the only living child of seven, and was therefore the object of much