eart is endowed. No person can
read the record of her lofty spirit and of her heroic acts without a
higher appreciation of woman's power, and of the mighty influence one
may wield, who combines the charms of a noble and highly-cultivated
mind with the fascinations of female delicacy and loveliness. To
understand the secret of the almost miraculous influence she exerted,
it is necessary to trace her career, with some degree of minuteness,
from the cradle to the hour of her sublime and heroic death.

In the year 1754, there was living, in an obscure workshop in Paris,
on the crowded Quai des Orfevres, an engraver by the name of Gratien
Phlippon. He had married a very beautiful woman, whose placid
temperament and cheerful content contrasted strikingly with the
restlessness and ceaseless repinings of her husband. The comfortable
yet humble apartments of the engraver were over the shop where he
plied his daily toil. He was much dissatisfied with his lowly
condition in life, and that his family, in the enjoyment of frugal
competence alone, were debarred from those luxuries which were so
profusely showered upon others. Bitterly and unceasingly he murmured
that his lot had been cast in the ranks of obscurity and of unsparing
labor, while others, by a more fortunate, although no better merited
destiny, were born to ease and affluence, and honor and luxury. This
thought of the unjust inequality in man's condition, which soon broke
forth with all the volcanic energy of the French Revolution, already
began to ferment in the bosoms of the laboring classes, and no one
pondered these wide diversities with a more restless spirit, or
murmured more loudly and more incessantly than Phlippon. When the
day's toil was ended, he loved to gather around him associates whose
feelings harmonized with his own, and to descant upon their own
grievous oppression and upon the arrogance of aristocratic greatness.
With an eloquence which often deeply moved his sympathizing auditory,
and fanned to greater intensity the fires which were consuming his own
heart, he contrasted their doom of sleepless labor and of comparative
penury with the brilliance of the courtly throng, living in idle
luxury, and squandering millions in the amusements at Versailles, and
sweeping in charioted splendor through the Champs Elysee.

Phlippon was a philosopher, not a Christian. Submission was a virtue
he had never learned, and never wished to learn. Christianity, as he
saw