Sundays and fête days were usually devoted to promenades by the Phlipons. The gayest paths, gardens, and boulevards were always chosen by M. Phlipon. He enjoyed the crowd and the mirth; and, above all, he enjoyed showing off his pretty daughter. But she, stern little moralist, when she discovered that her holiday toilette really gave her pleasure, that she actually felt flattered when people turned to look at her, that she found compliments sweet and admiring glances gratifying, trembled with apprehension. She might forgive her father’s vanity, but she could not forgive such a feeling in herself. Was it to walk in gardens and to be admired that she had been born? She gradually convinced herself that these promenades were inconsistent with her ideal of what was “beautiful and wise and grand,” and she urged her parents to the country, where all was in harmony with her thoughts and feelings. Meudon, still one of the loveliest of all the lovely forests in the environs of Paris, was her favorite spot. Its quiet, its naturalness, its variety, pleased her better than the movement and the artificiality of such a place as Saint-Cloud. In the forest of Meudon her passion for nature was fully satisfied; here she could study flower and tree, light and shade. In her love for nature Manon was in harmony with one of the curious phases of the sentimental life of the eighteenth century in France. Nature as food for sentiment seems to have never been discovered until then by the French people. One searches in vain in French literature before Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Rousseau for anything which resembles a comprehension of and feeling for the external world—yet unaided Manon Phlipon became naturalist and pantheist. Never did Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Rousseau, in their tramps in the environs of Paris, rejoice more profoundly over the beauties of the world, enter more deeply into its mysteries, than did she when in her girlhood she wandered in the _allées_ of the forest of Meudon or of the Bois de Vincennes. But Manon was to see still another side of life,—people in their relations to one another and to herself. Thus far she had been easily first in her little world. She had never known the time when she was not praised for her superiority. Whatever notions of equality she entertained it is certain that she had not yet discovered that Manon Phlipon was secondary to anybody else.