"I shall never forget," she said, "the Lent of 1763, during which I every day carried that book to church, instead of the book of prayers: it was from this moment that I date the impressions and ideas which made me republican, when I had never formed a thought on the subject." After Plutarch, Fenelon made the deepest impression upon her. Tasso and the poets followed. Heroism, virtue, and love were destined to pour from their three vases at once into the soul of a woman destined to this triple palpitation of grand impressions. In the midst of this fire in her soul her reason remained calm, and her purity spotless. She scarcely owns to the slightest and fugitive emotions of the heart and senses. "When as I read behind the screen which closed up my chamber from my father's apartment," she writes, "my breathing was at all loud, I felt a burning blush overspread my cheek, and my altered voice would have betrayed my agitation. I was Eucharis to Telemachus, and Herminia to Tancred. Yet, transformed as I was into them, I never thought myself of becoming anything to any body. I made no reflection that individually affected me; I sought nothing around me: it was a dream without awaking. Yet I remember having beheld with much agitation a young painter named Taboral, who called on my father occasionally. He was about twenty years of age, with a sweet voice, intelligent countenance, and blushed like a girl. When I heard him in the _atelier_, I had always a pencil or something to look after; but as his presence embarrassed as much as it pleased me, I went away quicker than I entered, with a palpitating heart, a tremor that made me run and hide myself in my little room."