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.
It was the controversial works of Bossuet which first induced Manon Phlipon to apply the test of reason to her faith. Soon after she began to study the Christian dogma rationally, she revolted against the doctrines of infallibility and of the universal damnation of all those who never knew or who had not accepted the faith. When she discovered that she could not accept these teachings, she resolved to find out if there was anything else which she must give up, and so attacked eagerly religious criticism, philosophy, metaphysics. She analyzed most thoroughly all she read and compared authorities with unusual intelligence.
As her investigations went on, she found that her faith was going, and she told her confessor, who immediately furnished her with the apologists and defenders of the Church, Abbé Gauchat, Bergier, Abbadie, Holland, Clark, and others. She read them conscientiously and annotated them all; some of these notes she left in the books, not unwittingly we may suspect. The Abbé asked her in amazement if the comments were original with her.
These annotations were, in fact, calculated to startle a curé interested in conserving the orthodoxy of a parishioner. Part of those she made on the works of the Abbé Gauchat fell into my hands with the extracts spoken of above. They are the bold, intelligent criticisms of a person who has resolved to subject every dogma to the test of reason. They are never contemptuous or scoffing, though there is frequently a tone of irritation at what she regards as the feebleness of the logic. They are free from prejudice and from sentiment, and show no deference to authority.
Another result of the curé’s loan of controversial works was to intimate to Manon what books they refuted, and she hastened to procure them one after another. Thus the Traité de la tolérance, Dictionnaire philosophique, the Questions encyclopédiques, the Bons sens and the Lettres juives, of the Marquis d’Argens, the works of Diderot, d’Alembert, Raynal, in fact all the literature of the encyclopedists passed through her hands.
Manon Phlipon did not change her religious feelings or devout practices during this period. She was living a religious life of peculiar intensity, all the time that she was deep in the examination of doctrines. The one was for her an affair of the heart, the other of the head. Her letters to Sophie, after the question of doubt had once been broached between them, are filled, now with philosophical analyses of dogma, now with glowing piety, now with severe rules of conduct. It was some time after she took to reasoning before the subject came up. Sophie’s own faith was troubled and she pictured her state to her friend. Manon, touched by this confidence, greater than her own had been, freely portrayed afterwards her own mental and spiritual condition. From these letters we find that she reached, very early in her study, certain conclusions which she never abandoned, and upon these as a basis erected a system which satisfied her heart and mind and which regulated her conduct.