animation of life,
and veined by blood which the least impression sent mounting to her
cheeks, a tone of voice which borrowed its vibrations from the deepest
fibres of her heart, and which was deeply modulated to its finest
movements (a precious gift, for the tone of the voice, which is the
channel of emotion in a woman, is the medium of persuasion in the
orator, and by both these titles nature owed her the charm of voice, and
had bestowed it on her freely). Such at eighteen years of age was the
portrait of this young girl, whom obscurity long kept in the shade, as
if to prepare for life or death a soul more strong, and a victim more
perfect.

III.

Her understanding lightened this beauteous frame-work with a precocious
and flashing intelligence, which was already inspiration. She acquired,
as it were, the most difficult accomplishments even from looking into
their very elements. What is taught to her age and sex was not
sufficient for her. The masculine education of men was a want and sport
to her. Her powerful mind had need of all the means of thought for its
due exercise. Theology, history, philosophy, music, painting, dancing,
the exact sciences, chemistry, foreign tongues and learned languages,
she learned all and desired more. She herself formed her ideas from all
the rays which the obscurity of her condition allowed to penetrate into
the laboratory of her father. She even secreted the books which the
young apprentices brought and forgot for her in the workshop. Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and the English philosophers,
fell into her hands; but her real food was Plutarch.

"I shall never forget," she said, "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 republican, when I had never formed a thought on the subject." After
Plutarch, Fenelon made the deepest impression upon her. Tasso and the
poets followed. Heroism, virtue, and love were destined to pour from
their three vases at once into the soul of a woman destined to this
triple palpitation of grand impressions.

In the midst of this fire in her soul her reason remained calm, and her
purity spotless. She scarcely owns to the slightest and fugitive
emotions of the heart and senses. "When as I read behind the screen
which closed up my chamber from my father's apartment," she writes, "my
breathing was at all lo