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Rh winter, stand with naked feet on the tiled floor of her bed-room, and, by way of penance, sprinkle her head with ashes—a frame of mind probably induced by her reading "The Lives of the Saints." In going to confession at this time, she once accused herself of "having had emotions contrary to the chastity of a Christian"; but the Abbé Morel not finding very much to say, she concluded that she was not so criminal as she had supposed. This phase of mind belonged to her fifteenth year, for in the course of a few years she began to inquire more deeply into her religious principles; and the first shock her belief sustained had its origin in her revolting from the idea of a "Creator, who devotes to eternal torments those innumerable beings, the frail works of his hands, cast on the earth in the midst of so many perils, and lost in a night of ignorance, from which they have already had so much to suffer." In the warmth of her heart she would have re-echoed Diderot's resounding cry—"Enlarge your God." With fearless truthfulness, Manon's first impulse on becoming conscious of her nascent doubts was to confide them to her confessor, a little man not wanting in sense and of unimpeachable conduct. Anxious to re-establish her shaken faith, he lent her a number of works by the champions of Christianity. The curious part of this transaction was that, on learning the names of the authors attacked in these controversial writings, she took care to procure them also, and thus came to read Diderot, D'Alembert, Raynal's Système de la Nature, passing in course of time through many intellectual stages, in which she was in turn Jansenist, Stoic, Sceptic, Atheist, and Deist. She finally landed in a frame of mind much resembling that of the modern Agnostic; content to admit that there is an