and merit, were unperceived by this crowd, who only adored favour or etiquette, oppressed her mind.  The philosophy, natural pride, imagination, and fixedness of her soul were all wounded during this sojourn.  “I preferred,” she says, “the statues in the gardens to the personages of the palace.”  And her mother inquiring if she were pleased with her visit—­“Yes,” was her reply, “if it be soon ended; for else, in a few more days I shall so much detest all the persons I see, that I should not know what to do with my hatred.”  “What harm have they done you?” inquired her mother.  “To make me feel injustice, and look upon absurdity.”  As she contemplated these splendours of the despotism of Louis XIV., which were drooping into corruption, she thought of Athens, but forgot the death of Socrates, the exile of Aristides, the condemnation of Phocion.  “I did not then foresee,” she writes, in melancholy mood, as she pens these lines—­“that destiny reserved me to be the witness of crimes such as those of which they were the victims, and to participate in the glory of their martyrs, after having professed their principles.”

Thus, the imagination, character, and studies of this girl prepared her, unknown to herself, for the republic.  Her religion alone, then so powerful over her, restrained her within the bounds of that resignation which submits the thoughts to the will of God.  But philosophy became her creed, and this creed formed a portion of her politics.  The emancipation of the people united itself in her mind with the emancipation of ideas.  She believed, by overturning thrones, that she was working for man; and, by overthrowing altars, that she was labouring for God.  Such is the confession 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.”