e educated with his wife, under the
guardianship of his brother, the Bishop of Lisieux, a celebrated Jesuit.
The mother of Condorcet was extremely superstitious, and in one of her
fanatic ecstasies, offered up her son at the shrine of the Virgin Mary.
How this act was performed we cannot relate; but it is a notorious
fact that until his twelfth year, the embryo philosopher was clothed
in female attire, and had young ladies for companions, which, M.
Arago says, "accounts for many peculiarities in the _physique_ and the
_morale_ of his manhood." The abstinence from all rude, boyish sports,
checked the proper muscular development of his limbs; the head and trunk
were on a large scale, but the legs were so meagre that they seemed
unfit to carry what was above them; and, in fact, he never could partake
in any strong exercises, or undergo the bodily fatigues to which healthy
men willingly expose themselves. On the other hand, he had imbibed the
tenderness of a delicate damsel, retaining to the last a deep horror for
affliction pain on the inferior animals.

In 1775, he entered the Jesuit Academy at Rheiras. Three years
afterwards, he was transferred to the College of Navarre, in Paris,
and soon made himself the most distinguished scholar there. His friends
wished him to enter the priesthood, not knowing that even in his
seventeenth year he had embraced the Deism of the age.

At the age of nineteen he left college, and immediate-ly published a
series of mathematical works, which established his fame. Shortly
after this, the Academy of Sciences chose Condorcet for their assistant
secretary. In the year 1770 he accompanied D'Alembert in a tour through
Italy, making a call for some weeks at Ferney, where he was delighted
with the company of Voltaire, and was duly recognised as one of the
Encylopaedists; and, on his return to Paris, became the literary agent of
his great leader.

A Quarterly Reviewer, writing on Voltaire and Condercet, says of the
former, "When he himself, in these latter days, was resolved to issue
anything that he knew and felt to be pregnant with combustion, he
never dreamt of Paris--he had agents enough in other quarters: and the
anonymous or pseudonymous mischief was printed at London, Amsterdam, or
Hamburgh, from a fifth or sixth copy in the handwriting of some Dutch
or English clerk--thence, by cautious steps, smuggled into France--and
then, disavowed and denounced by himself, and, for him, by his
number