Madame Phlipon’s marriage had been, as are the majority of her class, one of reason. If she had suffered from a lack of delicacy on the part of her husband, had never known deep happiness or real companionship, she had, at least, been loved by the rather ordinary man whom her superiority impressed, and her home had been pleasant and peaceful.
The Phlipons led a typical bourgeois life. The little home in the second story of the house on the Quai de l’Horloge contained both shop and living apartments. As in Paris to-day the business and domestic life were closely dovetailed. Madame Phlipon minded the work and received customers when her husband was out, helped with the accounts, and usually had at her table one or more of the apprentices. Their busy every-day life was varied in the simple and charming fashion of which the French have the secret, leisurely promenades on Sunday, to Saint-Cloud, Meudon, Vincennes, an hour now and then in the Luxembourg or Tuileries gardens, an occasional evening at the theatre. As the families of both Monsieur and Madame Phlipon were of the Parisian bourgeoisie they had many relatives scattered about in the commercial parts of the city, and much animation and variety were added to their lives by the constant informal visiting they did among them.
The chief interest of the Phlipon household was centred in its one little girl—the only child of seven left—Marie-Jeanne, or Manon, as she was called for short. Little Manon had not been born in the house on the Quai de l’Horloge, but in the Rue de la Lanterne (March 18, 1754), and the first two years of her life had been spent with a nurse in the suburbs of Arpajon. She was already a happy, active, healthy, observant child when she was brought back to her father’s home. The change from the quiet country house and garden, all of the world she had known, to the shifting panorama of the Seine and the Pont Neuf made a vivid impression upon her. The change, in fact, may be counted as the first step in her awakening. It quickened her power of observation and aroused in her a restless curiosity.
Never having known her mother until now, she was almost at once taken captive by the sweet, grave woman who guarded her with tenderest care, yet demanded from her implicit obedience. Madame Phlipon obtained over the child a complete ascendency and kept it so long as she lived. The father, on the contrary, never was able to win from his little daughter the homage she gave her mother. Monsieur Phlipon was often impatient and arbitrary with Manon. The child was already sufficiently developed when she began to make his acquaintance to discriminate dimly. While she was pliable to reason and affection, she was obstinate before force and impatience. She recognized that somehow they were illogical and unjust and she would endure but never yield to them. Thus among Manon’s first experiences was a species of hero-worship on one hand, of contempt for injustice on the other.
An incessant activity was one of the little girl’s natural qualities. This and her curiosity explain how she came to learn to read without anybody knowing exactly when. By the time she was four years old nothing but the promise of flowers tempted her away from her books, unless, indeed, it was stories; and with these the artist friends of M. Phlipon often entertained her, weaving extravagances by the hour, varying the pastime by repeating rhymes to her—an amusement which was even more entertaining to them since she repeated them like a parrot.
Madame Phlipon was a sincere and ardent Catholic and she took advantage of the eager activity of little Manon to teach her the Old and New Testament and the catechism. When the child was seven years old, she was sent to the class to be prepared for her first communion. Here she speedily distinguished herself, carrying away the prizes, much to the glory of her uncle Bimont, a young curé of the parish charged with directing the catechism.
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.