m in the exercise
of its functions. The chilling negations and arid skepticism of
Helvetius shocked her, and she writes: "I felt myself possessed of a
generosity of soul of which he denied the existence." She concluded at
this time that a republic is the true form of government, and that every
other form is in derogation of man's natural rights.

She mastered Clairaut's geometry by copying the book, plates, and all,
from beginning to end. She read Pufendorf's folio on the law of nature.
She learned English, and read the life of Cromwell. She read the great
French preachers, Bossuet, Flechier, Bourdaloue, and Massillon. She was
vexed by the terrorism of their arguments. She thought that they
overrated the importance of the devil. She did not believe him to be as
powerful as they feared. She thought that they might teach oftener what
seemed to her the potent element of Christian faith--love--and leave the
devil out sometimes, and so she herself wrote a sermon on brotherly
love, with which that personage had nothing to do, and in which his name
was not even mentioned. She also read the Protestant preachers--Blair
especially. She entangled herself in the acute skepticism of Bayle.

She seemed possessed of one of those assimilative intellects which
extract by glances the substance from a book as the flash of lightning
demagnetizes the lodestone. Her acquisitions were consequently immense.
Though very yielding in the grasp of the mighty thinkers whom she
encountered, yet she read them in the spirit of criticism, controversy,
and dissent.

She was, nevertheless, the farthest in the world from becoming a
literary dragon. All this did not impair the freshness of girlhood. She
was meek and pure. Passages in her autobiography, which I can not
repeat, yet which ought to be read, establish this. She was throughout
entirely domestic. She did the marketing, cooked the food; nursed her
mother; kept a sharp eye on the apprentices; nearly fell in love, for
when the young painter, Taborel, who was twenty, and blushed like a
girl, visited her father's workshop, she always had a crayon or
something else to seek there, but at the sight of him ran away
trembling, without saying a word.

It was not difficult for her to be both scholar and housewife. Writing
in after years, of domestic cares, she says: "I never could comprehend
how the attention of a woman who possesses method and activity can be
engrossed by them.... Nothing is wanting but