Nature lent herself admirably to the task, and had endowed her pupil with an understanding even superior to her dazzling beauty. This beauty of her earlier years, of which she has herself traced the principal features with infinite ingenuousness in the more sprightly pages of her memoirs, was far from having gained the energy, the melancholy, and the majesty which she subsequently acquired from repressed love, high thought, and misfortune. A tall and supple figure, flat shoulders, a prominent bust, raised by a free and strong respiration, a modest and most becoming demeanour, that carriage of the neck which bespeaks intrepidity, black and soft hair, blue eyes, which appeared brown in the depth of their reflection, a look which like her soul passed rapidly from tenderness to energy, the nose of a Grecian statue, a rather large mouth, opened by a smile as well as speech, splendid teeth, a turned and well rounded chin gave to the oval of her features that voluptuous and feminine grace without which even beauty does not elicit love, a skin marbled with the animation of life, and veined by blood which the least impression sent mounting to her cheeks, a tone of voice which borrowed its vibrations from the deepest fibres of her heart, and which was deeply modulated to its finest movements (a precious gift, for the tone of the voice, which is the channel of emotion in a woman, is the medium of persuasion in the orator, and by both these titles nature owed her the charm of voice, and had bestowed it on her freely). Such at eighteen years of age was the portrait of this young girl, whom obscurity long kept in the shade, as if to prepare for life or death a soul more strong, and a victim more perfect. III. Her understanding lightened this beauteous frame-work with a precocious and flashing intelligence, which was already inspiration. She acquired, as it were, the most difficult accomplishments even from looking into their very elements. What is taught to her age and sex was not sufficient for her. The masculine education of men was a want and sport to her. Her powerful mind had need of all the means of thought for its due exercise. Theology, history, philosophy, music, painting, dancing, the exact sciences, chemistry, foreign tongues and learned languages, she learned all and desired more. She herself formed her ideas from all the rays which the obscurity of her condition allowed to penetrate into the laboratory of her father. She even secreted the books which the young apprentices brought and forgot for her in the workshop. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and the English philosophers, fell into her hands; but her real food was Plutarch.