is domestic system. Both parents
lived in her and for her. She was their earthly all. The mother wished
to train her for the Church and for heaven, that she might become an
angel and dwell by the throne of God. These bright hopes gilded a
prayerful mother's hours of toil and care. The father bitterly
repined. Why should his bright and beautiful child--who even in these
her infantile years was giving indication of the most brilliant
intellect--why should she be doomed to a life of obscurity and toil,
while the garden of the Tuileries and the Elysian Fields were thronged
with children, neither so beautiful nor so intelligent, who were
reveling in boundless wealth, and living in a world of luxury and
splendor which, to Phlippon's imagination, seemed more alluring than
any idea he could form of heaven? These thoughts were a consuming
fire in the bosom of the ambitious father. They burned with
inextinguishable flame.

The fond parent made the sprightly and fascinating child his daily
companion. He led her by the hand, and confided to her infantile
spirit all his thoughts, his illusions, his day-dreams. To her
listening ear he told the story of the arrogance of nobles, of the
pride of kings, and of the oppression by which he deemed himself
unjustly doomed to a life of penury and toil. The light-hearted child
was often weary of these complainings, and turned for relief to the
placidity and cheerfulness of her mother's mind. Here she found
repose--a soothing, calm, and holy submission. Still the gloom of her
father's spirit cast a pensive shade over her own feelings, and
infused a tone of melancholy and an air of unnatural reflection into
her character. By nature, Jane was endowed with a soul of unusual
delicacy. From early childhood, all that is beautiful or sublime in
nature, in literature, in character, had charms to rivet her entranced
attention. She loved to sit alone at her chamber window in the evening
of a summer's day, to gaze upon the gorgeous hues of sunset. As her
imagination roved through those portals of a brighter world, which
seemed thus, through far-reaching vistas of glory, to be opened to
her, she peopled the sun-lit expanse with the creations of her own
fancy, and often wept in uncontrollable emotion through the influence
of these gathering thoughts. Books of impassioned poetry, and
descriptions of heroic character and achievements, were her especial
delight. Plutarch's Lives, that book which, more than any