It was during Mademoiselle d’Hannaches’ stay with the Phlipons that Manon made a visit of eight days to Versailles, then the seat of the French Court, with her mother, her uncle, and their guest, to whose influence indeed they owed their garret accommodations in the château. Many things shocked and humiliated her in the life she saw there, but she did not go home nearly so bitter and disillusioned as she tried to represent herself to have been, nine years later, when she told the story to posterity as an evidence of her early revolt against the abuses of the monarchy. In fact, the reflections which the week at Versailles awakened were very just and reasonable. We have them in a letter written to Sophie some days after her return: “I cannot tell you how much what I saw there has made me value my own situation and bless Heaven that I was born in an obscure rank. You believe, perhaps, that this feeling is founded on the little value which I attach to opinion and on the reality of the penalties which I see to be connected with greatness? Not at all. It is founded on the knowledge that I have of my own character which would be most harmful to myself and to the state if I were placed at a certain distance from the throne. I should be profoundly shocked by the enormous chasm between millions of men and one individual of their own kind. In my present position I love my King because I feel my dependence so little. If I were near him, I should hate his grandeur.... A good king seems to me an adorable being; still, if before coming into the world I had had my choice of a government I should have decided on a republic. It is true I should have wanted one different from any in Europe to-day.” Manon was twenty years old when she wrote this letter to Sophie Cannet. Its reasonable tone is very different from what one would expect from the passionate little mystic of the convent of the Congrégation, the sententious critic of Madame de Boismorel. In fact, Manon’s attitude towards the world had changed. By force of study and reflection she had come to understand human nature better, and to accept with philosophical resignation the contradictions, the pettiness, and the injustice of society. “The longer I live, the more I study and observe,” she told Sophie, “the more deeply I feel that we ought to be indulgent towards our fellows. It is a lesson which personal experience teaches us every day,—it seems to me that in proportion to the measure of light which penetrates our minds we are disposed to humaneness, to benevolence, to tolerant kindness.”