s recompense in the peace of a celestial
abode. Delicious tears flowed slowly down my cheeks; I reiterated my
vows with a holy transport, and I enjoyed the slumber of the elect."

As if in these silent cloisters, which she crossed slowly so as to
enjoy their solitude more fully, she had a presentiment of the storms
in her destiny and her heart, she sometimes stopped beside a tomb on
which was engraven the eulogy of a holy maiden. "She is happy!" she
said to herself with a sigh. While she was in prison she remembered
with emotion a novice's taking the veil: "I experience yet the {53}
thrill caused by her faintly tremulous voice when she chanted
melodiously the customary versicle: '_Elegi_: Here I have chosen my
abode, and I will not depart from it forever.' I have not forgotten
the notes of this little air; I can repeat them as exactly as if I had
heard them yesterday."

Unhappily, religious ideas were soon to undergo a change in the mind of
the future Madame Roland. Returning to the paternal dwelling, she was
badly brought up there; her mother let her read everything, even
_Candide_. Voltaire, Helvetius, Diderot, had no secrets for this young
girl. Extreme disorder and confusion in mind and heart were the
result. When she had the misfortune to lose her mother at the age of
twenty-one, the book in which she sought consolation was the _Nouvelle
Heloise_. Jean-Jacques became her god. "It seems," she says, "as if
he were my natural aliment and the interpreter of the sentiment I had
already, and which he alone knew how to explain to me.... To have the
whole of Jean-Jacques," she says again, "to be able to consult him
incessantly, to enlighten and elevate one's self with him at all times
of life, is a felicity which can only be tasted by adoring him as I
did." Such reading robbed her of faith. It made her a free-thinker
and a bluestocking. It inspired her with an unhealthy ambition,
sullied her imagination, and troubled the peace of her heart. It
deprived her of that moral delicacy, lacking which, even virtue itself
loses its charms. She was no longer anything but a young {54} girl,
well-conducted but not pure, honest but shameless.

Was not a day coming when, a prisoner and on the point of getting into
the fatal cart, she would throw off the terrible anxieties of her
situation in order to imitate the impurities of the _Confessions_ of
Jean-Jacques, and retrace indecent details with complacency? Do not
see