Her vigorous, passionate young nature asserted itself; her mind burned with the possibilities of happiness; sentiment regained the power temporarily given to the intellect, and from that time was the ruling force of her life.
“I fear that he strengthened my weakness,” Manon wrote of Rousseau towards the end of her life, and certainly he did destroy the fine harmony that she had established between her reason and her feelings, making the latter master. She was quite right in thinking it fortunate that she had not read him earlier. “He would have driven me mad; I should have been willing to read nobody but him.”
The Nouvelle Héloïse was not, however, the first of Rousseau she had read. Émile had passed through her hands, and her religious convictions had unquestionably been influenced by the Profession of Faith of the Vicar of Savoy. But she had read him critically so far. Now all was changed. She plunged enthusiastically into his works. She found there clearly and fully stated what she herself had vaguely and imperfectly felt; the sentiments he interpreted had stirred her; many of the principles he laid down for conduct she had been practising. In less than a year she was defending his works to Sophie.
“I am astonished that you wonder at my love for Rousseau. I regard him as the friend of humanity, as its benefactor and mine. Who pictures virtue in a nobler and more touching manner? Who renders it more worthy of love? His works inspire a taste for truth, simplicity, wisdom. As for myself, I know well that I owe to them all that is best in me. His genius has warmed my soul, I have been inflamed, elevated, and ennobled by it.
“I do not deny that there are some paradoxes in Émile, some proceedings that our customs make impracticable. But how many profound and wholesome opinions, how many useful precepts! how many beauties to save the faults! Moreover, I confess that observation has led me to approve things that at first I treated as foolish and chimerical. His Héloïse is a masterpiece of sentiment. The woman who can read it without being better or at least without desiring to become so, has only a soul of clay, a mind of apathy. She will never rise above the common.... In all that he has done one recognizes not only a genius, but an honest man and citizen.... And a scaffold has come near being erected for this man, to whom, in another century, one will perhaps raise altars!”
Manon Phlipon had found in Rousseau her guide. The feminine need of an authority was satisfied. She accepted him en bloc, and to defend and follow him became henceforth her concern.
Manon’s first appreciation of Rousseau was, naturally enough, an attempt to play Julie to a fancied Saint-Preux. It is not to be supposed that this is the first time in her life that her attention was turned towards a lover. Ever since her piety began to cool under the combined effects of study and observation, and her natural vanity and love of attention began to assert themselves, she had thought a great deal of her future husband. In a French girl’s life a future husband is a foregone conclusion, and Manon, like all her countrywomen, had been accustomed to the presentation of this or that person whom some zealous friend thought a fitting mate for her. The procession of suitors that passes before the readers of her Memoirs is so long and so motley that one is inclined to believe that more than one is there by virtue of the heroine’s imagination. Manon Phlipon was one of those women who see in every man a possible lover.
The applications for her hand began with her guitar master, who, having taught her all he knew, ended by asking her to marry him. Then there was a widower who had prepared himself for his courtship by having a wen removed from his left cheek; the family butcher, who sought to win her regard by sending her the choicest cuts of steak, and appearing on Sunday in the midst of the Phlipons’ family promenade, arrayed in lace and fine broadcloth; and in turn all the eligible young men and widowers of the Place Dauphine. They were, without exception, peremptorily declined by the young woman through her father. Had she read Plutarch and all the philosophers, only to tie herself up to a merchant bent on getting rich and cutting a good figure in his quarter?
Her parents, flattered and amused by this cortège, did not at first try to influence Manon to accept any one, but at last her father became anxious. The disdain with which she refused all representatives of commerce annoyed him a little, too. “What kind of a man will suit you?” he asked her one day.
“You have taught me to reflect, and allowed me to form studious habits. I don’t know to what kind of a man I shall give myself, but it will never be to any one with whom I cannot share my thoughts and sentiments.”