So the little Philipon wanted to take the chief place in the fruiterer's shop, just as, later on, she desired it on the political stage or the Ministry of the Interior. This enemy of privileges will admit them only for herself. In everything she made pretentions: pretentions to elegance, beauty, distinction, talent, knowledge, eloquence, genius, and, when she wanted to be simple, to simplicity. In her style as in her conversation, in her public as in her private life, what she sought before all things was effect. It was absolutely essential that people should talk about her, that she should be playing a part, or standing on a pedestal. Assuredly, if she had a fault, it was not excess of modesty. She regarded herself as the flower of her sex, a superior woman, made to be loved, flattered, and adored. She speaks of her charms with the precision of a doctor and the enthusiasm of a poet. Not one of her perfections escapes her. It is through a magnifying-glass and before a mirror that she studies and admires herself. She discovers that a society in which a woman so remarkable and so attractive is not thoroughly well known, must be badly organized. Middle-class by birth, and aristocratic by instinct, she represents what one might then have called the new social strata. A secret voice told her that the day was to come when she would make herself feared by the powerful of the earth, those giants with feet of clay who, at the beginning of her {50} career, were still looked at kneeling. Banished by fate from the theatre where the human tragi-comedy is played, she said to herself: "I too will have a part one of these days." In the earliest stage of her existence there was in her a confused medley of uneasiness and ambition, of spite and anger. She had a horror of the slightly disdainful protection of people of quality. She conceived an aversion for persons like that Demoiselle d'Hannaches, "big, awkward, dry, and yellow," infatuated with her nobility, annoying everybody with her titles, and yet, in spite of her ignorance, her stiff manners, her old-fashioned dress and her follies, well received everywhere on account of her birth.