Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/14

4 medicine. Her father administered whipping the second; uttering loud screams, she now tried to upset the glass. A movement betraying this intention, enraged her father completely, and he threatened to whip her for the third time. From that moment a sudden and violent revulsion of feeling took place in Manon. Her sobs ceased, she dried her tears, all her faculties became concentrated in an intense effort of will. She rose from her bed, turned to the wall, and nerved herself to receive the blows in silence. "They might have killed me on the spot," she says in her famous Memoirs, penned in a prison within a stone's-throw of the scaffold, "without my uttering so much as a sigh; nor will it cost me more to-day to ascend the guillotine than it did then to yield to a barbarous treatment which might have killed but not conquered me."

This was her father's last effort at education. Not that he was habitually unkind or cruel in his treatment of his only child. On the contrary, he idolized his daughter, especially in her early girlhood, when his susceptible vanity was flattered by the attention she attracted. His method of dealing with her must be laid to the charge of the manners of the times, severe and harsh to children, where not modified by exceptional refinement of nature. However, as we have said, M. Phlipon henceforth wisely avoided pitting his will against his daughter's, and entirely left her guidance to the wise and loving hands of his wife. But he was very proud of the child's precocious intelligence, and for her station and years she had an array of masters which goes far to prove that her parents must have considered hers a very exceptional nature.

At seven years of age Manon was sent every Sunday