Mademoiselle Phlipon had likewise, in the days before her marriage, been influenced by public affairs. She was in a centre where the populace throbbed continually. A stone’s throw from her house the Parlement sat, and its every act was a sign for popular joy or discontent. There could be no demonstration without its passing largely under her windows. From the first days of her life, then, her political education commenced. A child of less intellectual curiosity and of less sensibility would not have responded to these popular outbursts. They would have made but fleeting impressions. It was different with her; she watched it all, felt the rage or joy of the people, and brooded over its meaning. There is, indeed, no more fascinating study in her life than the influence which the panorama of the Pont Neuf and the Place Dauphine had upon her. When she was eight years old she saw the smoke of burning volumes, as she looked from her window towards the Place de la Grève. It was Rousseau’s _Émile_ going up in smoke. Every year after she saw the same suggestive sight. Now it was remonstrances against interferences by the King with the rights of the Parlement which were burned; now the seditious utterances of the independent parlements of Bretagne, of Rouen, of Dauphiné; now a too liberal general history of the present condition of Europe, translated from the English; now too bold reflections on feudal rights; now Voltaire’s _Dictionnaire philosophique_; now Holbach; now Raynal; now Helvétius. In 1775 she heard La Harpe admonished “to be more circumspect in the future,” because of a daring article he had published. These condemned authors she was beginning to read. She began to hear from her earliest days the word _révolution_. It had been pronounced frequently for a long time in private, but it began to be said aloud. When she was nine years old, a Paris priest declared: “We approach a state of crisis and an age of revolutions. I believe it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe endure long.” The priest was condemned at the Châtelet across the river from her window, but his discourse was printed and scattered right and left. She heard gossip of how the Parlement had told the King that Frenchmen are free men and not slaves; and a little later it is quite possible that she saw the King on his way to the Palais de Justice, where, under the very eyes of the Parlement, he erased their rebellious decree, and declared: “It is in my person alone that the sovereign power exists; it is from me alone that my courts have their existence and their authority; it is to me alone that independent and indivisible legislative power belongs; public order emanates entirely from me.”