rivolous as he
was handsome; but his beautiful wife was serious-minded, and much
the superior of her husband in intellect as well as morals. Of seven
children born to this couple, only one lived--Manon, the subject of
our sketch--who inherited the combined beauty of both parents, with
the rectitude and high ideals of the mother. But there lies no
explanation of inheritance from either father or mother to make us
understand how the child of these common people became at nine years
of age a student of Plutarch, Tasso, and Voltaire, and a philosopher
at the age of eleven. It requires a deeper law than that of heredity
to explain these things.

At ten, Manon developed a strongly religious tendency, which was
fostered, no doubt, by daily studying the "Lives of the Saints."
While reading the accounts of martyrs who had died at the stake
rather than resign their faith, the child often regretted that she
had not lived in those "good old days," so happy a thing it seemed
to her to die for one's principles. This privilege was granted her
in after-years, strangely enough; and she proved as courageous in
reality as she had in childhood imagined herself capable of being
under similar circumstances.

Manon's religious feelings were culminated by a request made to her
mother, in a paroxysm of tears, that she might be placed in a
convent to prepare herself for her first communion; accordingly, she
was taken to the Convent of the "Sisters of the Congregation" in
May, 1765, when she was eleven years old. Side by side with this
nunnery, where the precocious child passed one of the happiest
epochs of her life, stood the prison which was to immure her in
later years. Should such a circumstance and situation be unfolded in
the pages of fiction, we would call it strained and unnatural.

During the year Manon passed in the convent, she made the
acquaintance of two sisters, Henrietta and Sophie Cannet, who were
allied to the nobility; and she afterward attributed her facility in
writing to the correspondence with the younger of these sisters,
which continued without interruption over more than a decade of
years. In her memoirs, written under the shadow of the guillotine,
she says, "In the gloom of a prison, in the midst of political
storms, how shall I recall to my mind, and how describe, the
rapture, the tranquillity I enjoyed at that period; but when I
review the events of my life, I find it difficult to assign to
circumstances that vari