This stock was not exhausted before she had the happiness to be turned loose in the library of an abbé—a friend of her uncle. It was a house where her mother and Mademoiselle d’Hannaches went often to make up a party of tric-trac with the two curés. As it was necessary always to take her along, all parties were satisfied that Manon could lose herself in a book. For three years she found here all she could read: history, literature, mythology, the Fathers of the Church. Dozens of obscure authors passed through her hands; now and then she happened on a classic—something from Voltaire, from Bossuet. Here too she read _Don Quixote_. But the good abbé died, the tric-trac parties in his library ceased, and Manon had to turn to the public library for books. She chose without any plan, generally a book of which she had heard. So far her reading had been simply out of curiosity, from a need of doing something. Usually she had several books on hand at once—some serious, others light, one of which she was always reading aloud to her mother. The habit of reading, especially aloud, was one of the chief means advised by the French educators of the time for carrying on a girl’s education. Madame de Sévigné, Fénelon, Madame de Maintenon, L’abbé de Saint-Pierre, the authorities at Port Royal, all had made much of the practice. Manon read their treatises, and finding that she had herself already adopted methods similar to those of the wisest men and women of her country, continued her work with new vigor. All that she read she analyzed carefully, and she spent much time in making extracts. Through the courtesy of one of the descendants of Mademoiselle Phlipon, M. Léon Marillier of Paris, I had in my possession at one time, for examination, a large number of her _cahiers_ prepared at this period. They are made of a coarse, grayish-blue paper, with rough edges, and are covered with a strong, graceful handwriting, almost never marred by erasures or changes, much of it looking as if it had been engraved; more characteristic and artistic manuscript one rarely sees. The subjects of the quotations in the _cahiers_ are nearly always deeply serious. In one there are eight pages on Necessity, long quotations on Death, Suicide, the Good Man, Happiness, the Idea of God. Another contains a long analysis of a work on Divorce Legislation, which had pleased her. Buffon and Voltaire are freely quoted from. The passages which attracted her are philosophic and dogmatic rather than literary and sentimental, or devout. In fact, Manon became, in the period between fourteen and twenty-one, deeply interested in the philosophic thought of the day. Soon she was examining dispassionately, and with a freedom of mind remarkable in so unquestioning a believer as she had been, the entire system of religion which she had been taught. Once started on this track, her reading took a more systematic and intelligent turn. She read for a purpose, not simply out of curiosity.