Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, for this was her maiden name, was born in Paris in the year 1754.  Her father was an engraver.  The daughter does not delineate him in her memoirs with such completeness as she has sketched her mother, but we can infer from the fleeting glimpses which she gives of him that he was a man of very considerable intellectual and physical force, but also of most irregular tendencies, which in his later years debased him to serious immoralities.  He was a superior workman, discontented with his lot.  He sought to better it by speculative operations outside his vocation.  As his daughter expresses it, “he went in pursuit of riches, and met with ruin on his way.”  She also remarks of him, “that he could not be said to be a good man, but he had a great deal of what is called honor.”

Her mother was evidently an angelic woman.  Many passages in the memoirs indicate that she possessed uncommon intellectual endowments; but so exceeding were her virtues that, when her face rose to the daughter’s view in the night of after years, and gazed compassionately on her through prison bars, the daughter, writing in the shadow of death, presents her in the light only of purest, noblest womanhood.

Marie was so precocious that she could not remember when she was unable to read.  The first book she remembered reading was the Old and New Testament.  Her early religious teaching was most sufficient, and was submitted to by a mind which, although practical and realistic, was always devout and somewhat affected by mystical, vague, and enthusiastic tendencies.  She was a prodigy in the catechism, and was an agent of terror to the excellent priest who taught her and the other children, for she frequently confounded him in open class by questions which have vexed persons of maturest years.  She was taught the harp, the piano, the guitar, and the violin.  She was proficient in dancing.  Such was her astonishing aptitude in all studies that she says, “I had not a single master who did not appear as much flattered by teaching me as I was grateful for being taught; nor one who, after attending me for a year or two, was not the first to say that his instructions were no longer necessary.”  It was her habit in childhood, after she had read any book, to lay it aside and reconstruct its contents by the processes of a most powerful memory, and while doing so, to meditate upon, analyze, and debate with it in the severest spirit of criticism and controversy.

When nine years of age she was reading Appian, the romances of Scarron, which disgusted and did not taint her; the memoirs of De Paites and of Madame de Montpensier.  She mastered a treatise on heraldry so thoroughly that she corrected her father one day when she saw him engraving a seal inconformably to some minor rule of that art.  She essayed a book on contracts, but it did not entice her to a complete perusal.