M. Phlipon and his wife, delighted with the child’s precocity, gave her masters,—one to teach her to write and to give her history and geography, another for the piano, another for dancing, another for the guitar. M. Phlipon himself gave her drawing, and the Curé Bimont Latin. She attacked these duties eagerly,—getting up at five in the morning to copy her exercises and do her examples,—active because she could not help it. But her real education was not what she was getting in these conventional ways. It was what the books she read gave her. These were of the most haphazard sort: the Bible in old French, to which she was greatly attached, the _Lives of the Saints_, _The Civil Wars of Appias_, Scarron, the _Memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier_, a treatise on Heraldry, another on Contracts, many travels, dramas of all sorts, _Télémaque_, _Jerusalem Delivered_, even _Candide_. The child read with passionate absorption. At first it was simply for something to do, as she did her exercises or fingered her guitar; but soon she began to feel strongly and she sought in her books food for the strange new emotions which stirred her heart, brought tears to her eyes, and awakened her to the mysteries of joy and sorrow long before she was able to call those emotions by name. In the motley collection of books read by Manon at this period one only made a life-long impression upon her,—it was Dacier’s _Plutarch_. No one can understand the eighteenth century in France without taking into consideration the profound impress made upon it by _Plutarch’s Lives_. The work was the source of the dreams and of the ambitions of numbers of the men who exercised the greatest influence on the intellectual and political life of the period. Jean Jacques Rousseau declares that when he first read _Plutarch_, at about nine years of age, it cured him of his love of romance, and formed his free and republican character, and the impatience of servitude which tormented him throughout his life. Hundreds of others like Rousseau, many of them, no doubt, in imitation of him, trace their noblest qualities to the same source.