Sometimes she was taken to visit certain ladies who claimed to be noble, and who, looking upon her as an inferior, sent her to dine with their servants. Once she paid a visit of eight days at Versailles, and witnessed the routine of a court. How different were the impertinent pretensions of these silly women, and the paltry pomp of royalty, from the majesty of the solitary reveries in which she associated with the heroes and philosophers of old! Her soul rejected distinctions of rank such as she found them in her own country,--empty in themselves, as far as regarded real excellence, and degrading to her in her position,--and she hurried back to take her proper place in creation, not the humble daughter of an obscure mechanic, but one whose mind was refined by philosophy, enlarged by knowledge; whose heart beat with generous impulses, and who already felt her bosom swell with the heroism which her future actions displayed. "I sighed," she writes, "as I thought of Athens, where I could have equally admired the fine arts, without being wounded by the spectacle of despotism; I transported myself in thought to Greece--I was present at the Olympic games, and I grew angry at finding myself French. Thus, struck by all of grand which is offered by the republics of antiquity, I forgot the death of Socrates, the exile of Aristides, the sentence of Phocion; I did not know that heaven had reserved it to me to witness errors similar to those of which they were the victims, and to participate in a similar persecution, after having professed similar principles." She regarded the position she held in society with bitterness. Vain of her accomplishments and knowledge, proud in the consciousness of her integrity and of the lofty meditations in which she indulged, the condescension of the petty noblesse towards the daughter of an artisan made her bosom swell with haughty emotion. She does not disguise that this feeling caused her to hail the revolution with greater transport.