She reveals herself to us as two distinct characters. The one best known
is hard, bitter, coldly analytic, and mocks at everything bordering upon
sentiment or feeling. The other, which underlies this, and of which
we have rare glimpses, is frank, tender, loving even to weakness, and
forever at war with the barrenness of a period whose worst faults
she seems to have embodied, and whose keenest penalties she certainly
suffered.

Voltaire, the lifelong friend whom she loved, but critically measured,
was three years old when she was born; Mme. de Sevigne had been dead
nearly a year. Of a noble family in Burgundy, Marie de Vichy-Chamroud
was brought to Paris at six years of age and placed in the convent of
St. Madeleine de Traisnel, where she was educated after the superficial
fashion which she so much regrets in later years. She speaks of herself
as a romantic, imaginative child, but she began very early to shock
the pious sisters by her dawning skepticism. One of the nuns had a wax
figure of the infant Jesus, which she discovered to have been a doll
formerly dressed to represent the Spanish fashions to Anne of Austria.
This was the first blow to her illusions, and had a very perceptible
influence upon her life. She pronounced it a deception. Eight days of
solitude with a diet of bread and water failed to restore her reverence.
"It does not depend upon me to believe or disbelieve," she said. The
eloquent and insinuating Massillon was called in to talk with her.
"She is charming," was his remark, as he left her after two hours of
conversation; adding thoughtfully, "Give her a five-cent catechism."

Skeptical by nature and saturated with the free-thinking spirit of
the time, she reasoned that all religion was au fond, only paganism
disguised. In later years, when her isolated soul longed for some
tangible support, she spoke regretfully of the philosophic age which
destroyed beliefs by explaining and analyzing everything.

But a beautiful, clever, high-spirited girl of sixteen is apt to feel
her youth all suffering. It is certain that she had no inclination
towards the life of a religieuse, and the country quickly became
insupportable after her return to its provincial society. Ennui took
possession of her. She was glad even to go to confessional, for the sake
of telling her thoughts to some one. She complained bitterly that
the life of women compelled dependence upon the conduct of others,
submission to all ills and all co