When little Manon Phlipon first read the Lives, the stories of these noble deeds moved her almost to delirium. She carried her book to church all through one Lent in guise of a prayer-book and read through the service. When at night, alone in her room, she leaned from the window and looked upon the Pont Neuf and Seine, she wept that she had not been born in Athens or Sparta. She was beginning to apply to herself what she read, to feel that the noble actions which aroused such depths of feeling in her heart were not only glorious to hear of but to perform. She was filled with awe at the idea that she was herself a creature capable of sublime deeds. A solemn sense of responsibility was awakened, and she felt that she must form her soul for a worthy future. When most children are busy with toys she was trembling before a mysterious possibility,—a life of great and good deeds, a possibility which she faintly felt was dependent upon her own efforts.
THE PLACE DAUPHINE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Mademoiselle Phlipon lived in the second story of the house on the left.
Once penetrated by this splendid ideal, however vague it may have been, it was inevitable that the rites of the Church, full of mysticism and exaltation, the teachings of devotion and self-abnegation, the pictures of lives spent in holy service, should appeal deeply to Manon’s sensitive and untrained consciousness. As the time of her first communion approached, and curé and friends combined to impress upon the child the solemn and eternal importance of the act, she was more and more stirred by dread and exaltation. All her time was given to meditation, to prayer, to pious reading. Every day she fingered the Lives of the Saints, sighing after the times when the fury of the pagans bestowed the crown of martyrdom upon Christians.
The necessary interruptions to her devotions which occurred in the household, disturbed her. At last she felt that she could not endure any longer the profane atmosphere; throwing herself at her parents’ feet, she begged to be allowed to go to a convent to prepare for the sacrament. M. and Madame Phlipon, touched by the zeal of their daughter, consented to let her leave them for a year.
It was not a difficult matter to find a convent suitable for a young girl of any class, in the Paris of the eighteenth century. That selected by the Phlipons for Manon stood in the Rue Neuve Ste. Étienne, a street now known as Rue Rollin and Rue Navarre. The convent, Dames de la Congrégation de Notre Dame, established in 1645, was well known for the gratuitous instruction its sisters gave the children of the very poor as well as for the simplicity and honesty with which the pension for young girls was conducted, a thing which could not be said of many of the convents of that day.
The instruction given by the Dames de la Congrégation was not, however, any better than that of other institutions of the kind, if the morals were. The amount of education regarded as necessary for a French girl of good family at this period was, in fact, very meagre; even girls of the highest classes being allowed to grow to womanhood in astonishing ignorance. Madame du Deffand says that in the convent where she was placed nothing was taught except “reading and writing, a light, very light tinting of history, the four rules, some needle-work, many pater-nosters—that was all.” Madame Louise, the sister of Louis XVI., did not know her alphabet at twelve, so says Madame Campan. Madame de Genlis taught her handsome sister-in-law, the favorite of the Duke of Orleans, to write after she was married. Madame de Genlis herself at twelve years of age had read almost nothing.
Manon Phlipon’s acquirements when she entered the convent, at a little over eleven years of age, were certainly much greater than those of these celebrated women at her age. It is probable that her instruction was far above that not only of the girls of her age in the school, but of the most advanced pupils, perhaps even of some of the good sisters themselves.
The superior training of the new pupil was soon known. The discovery caused her to be petted by all the sisterhood, and she was granted special privileges of study. She continued her piano lessons and drawing, so that she had sufficient work to satisfy her active nature and to make the leisure given her sweet. This leisure she never passed with her companions. Her frame of mind was altogether too serious to permit her to romp like a child. The recreation hours she spent apart, in a quiet corner of the silent old garden, reading or dreaming, permeated by the beauty of the foliage, the sigh of the wind, the perfume of the flowers. All this she felt, in her exalted state, was an expression of God, a proof of his goodness. With her heart big with gratitude and adoration, she would leave the garden to kneel in the dim church, and listen to the chanting of the choir and the roll of the organ.
Sensitive, unpractical, fervent, the imposing and mystic services allured her imagination and moved her heart until she lost self-control and wept, she did not know why.