ession which she herself made of her change.

VIII.

However, the young girl had already attracted many suitors for her hand.
Her father wished to marry her in the class to which he himself
belonged. He loved, esteemed commerce, because he considered it the
source of wealth. His daughter despised it because it was, in her eyes,
the source of avarice and the food of cupidity. Men in this condition of
life were repugnant to her. She desired in a husband ideas and feelings
sympathising with her own. Her ideal was a soul and not a fortune.
"Brought up from my infancy in connexion with the great men of all ages,
familiar with lofty ideas and illustrious examples--had I lived with
Plato, with all the philosophers, all the poets, all the politicians of
antiquity, merely to unite myself with a shopkeeper, who would neither
appreciate nor feel any thing as I did?"

She who wrote these lines was at that moment demanded in marriage of her
parents by a rich butcher of the neighbourhood. She refused every offer.
"I will not descend from the world of my noble chimeras," she replied to
the incessant remonstrances of her father; "what I want is not a
position but a mind. I will die single rather than prostitute my own
mind in an union with a being with whom I have no sympathies."

Deprived of her mother by an early death, alone in the house of a father
where disorder was the consequence of a second _amour_, melancholy
gained possession of her mind, though it did not overcome it. She
became more collected and reserved, in order to strengthen her feelings
against isolation and misfortune. The perusal of the _Heloise_ of
Rousseau, which was lent to her about that time, made on her heart the
same impression that Plutarch had made on her mind. Plutarch had shown
her liberty; Rousseau made her dream of happiness: the one fortified,
the other weakened her. She found the earnest desire of pouring forth
her feelings. Melancholy was her rigid muse. She began to write, in
order to console herself in the nurture of her own thoughts. Without any
intention of becoming an authoress, she acquired by these solitary
trials that eloquence with which she subsequently animated her friends.

IX.

Thus gradually ripened this patient and resolute mind, working on
towards its destiny, when she believed she had found the man of the
olden time of whom she had so long dreamed. This man was Roland de la
Platiere.

He was introduced to her by one of her