Little wonder that after that Madame de Boismorel cautioned the grandmother, “Take care that she does not become a blue-stocking; it would be a great pity.”
Manon went home from this visit full of disdain and anxiety. Evidently things were not as they ought to be when servants dared to compliment her to her face; when her own noble ideas were greeted coldly, and when a vain and vulgar woman could patronize a sweet and bright little lady like her grandmother; when her grandmother, too, would submit to the patronage—perhaps even court it.
She was to observe still more closely the world’s practices. An acquaintance of the family, one Mademoiselle d’Hannaches, was in difficulty over an inheritance and obliged to be in Paris to work up her case. Madame Phlipon took her into her house, where she stayed some eighteen months. Now Mademoiselle d’Hannaches belonged to an ancient family, and on account of her birth demanded extra consideration from those about her and treated her bourgeois friends with a certain condescension. Manon became a sort of secretary to her and often accompanied her when she went out on business. “I noticed,” wrote Manon afterwards, “that in spite of her ignorance, her stiff manner, her incorrect language, her old-fashioned toilette,—all her absurdities,—deference was paid her because of her family. The names of her ancestors, which she always enumerated, were listened to gravely and were used to support her claim. I compared the reception given to her with that which Madame de Boismorel had given to me and which had made a profound impression upon me. I knew that I was worth more than Mademoiselle d’Hannaches, whose forty years and whose genealogy had not given her the faculty of writing a sensible or legible letter. I began to find the world very unjust and its institutions most extravagant.”
Mademoiselle Phlipon had scarcely become accustomed to these vanities in the society which she frequented, before she began to observe equally puzzling and ridiculous pretensions in artistic and literary circles. Through the kindness of her masters and of the friends of M. and Madame Phlipon, she was often invited to the reunions of bels esprits, so common in Paris then and now. It was not in a spirit of humiliation and flattered vanity that so independent an observer and judge as she had become, surveyed the celebrities she was allowed to look upon and to listen to, in the various salons to which she was admitted. She saw immediately the pose which characterized nearly all of the gatherings, the pretentious vanity of those who read verses or portraits, the insincerity and diplomacy of those who applauded. The blue-stockings who read as their own verses which they had not always written, and who were paid by ambitious salon leaders for sitting at their table; the small poets who found inspiration in the muffs and snuff-boxes of the great ladies whose favor they wanted; the bold, and not always too chaste, compliments,—verily, if they made the gatherings délicieuses, as they who followed them declared, there was a deep gulf between Manon Phlipon’s standards and those of the society which her family congratulated her upon being able to see.
It was during Mademoiselle d’Hannaches’ stay with the Phlipons that Manon made a visit of eight days to Versailles, then the seat of the French Court, with her mother, her uncle, and their guest, to whose influence indeed they owed their garret accommodations in the château. Many things shocked and humiliated her in the life she saw there, but she did not go home nearly so bitter and disillusioned as she tried to represent herself to have been, nine years later, when she told the story to posterity as an evidence of her early revolt against the abuses of the monarchy. In fact, the reflections which the week at Versailles awakened were very just and reasonable. We have them in a letter written to Sophie some days after her return:
“I cannot tell you how much what I saw there has made me value my own situation and bless Heaven that I was born in an obscure rank. You believe, perhaps, that this feeling is founded on the little value which I attach to opinion and on the reality of the penalties which I see to be connected with greatness? Not at all. It is founded on the knowledge that I have of my own character which would be most harmful to myself and to the state if I were placed at a certain distance from the throne. I should be profoundly shocked by the enormous chasm between millions of men and one individual of their own kind. In my present position I love my King because I feel my dependence so little. If I were near him, I should hate his grandeur.... A good king seems to me an adorable being; still, if before coming into the world I had had my choice of a government I should have decided on a republic. It is true I should have wanted one different from any in Europe to-day.”
Manon was twenty years old when she wrote this letter to Sophie Cannet. Its reasonable tone is very different from what one would expect from the passionate little mystic of the convent of the Congrégation, the sententious critic of Madame de Boismorel. In fact, Manon’s attitude towards the world had changed. By force of study and reflection she had come to understand human nature better, and to accept with philosophical resignation the contradictions, the pettiness, and the injustice of society. “The longer I live, the more I study and observe,” she told Sophie, “the more deeply I feel that we ought to be indulgent towards our fellows. It is a lesson which personal experience teaches us every day,—it seems to me that in proportion to the measure of light which penetrates our minds we are disposed to humaneness, to benevolence, to tolerant kindness.”
Nor had she at this time any bitterness towards the existing order of government. If she “would have chosen a republic if she had been allowed a choice before coming into the world,” she had so far no idea of rejecting the rule under which she was born. Indeed, she was a very loyal subject of Louis XVI. When that prince came to the throne she wrote to her friend: “The ministers are enlightened and well disposed, the young prince docile and eager for good, the Queen amiable and beneficent, the Court kind and respectable, the legislative body honorable, the people obedient, wishing only to love their master, the kingdom full of resources. Ah, but we are going to be happy!” Nor did her ideas of equality at this period make her see in the mass of the common people equals of those who by training, education, and birth had been fitted to govern. “Truly human nature is not very respectable when one considers it in a mass,” she reflected one day, as she saw the people of Paris swarming even to the roofs to watch a poor wretch tortured on the wheel. In describing a bread riot in 1775, she condemned the people as impatient, called the measures of the ministers wise, and excused the government by recalling Sully’s reflection: “With all our enlightenment and good-will it is still difficult to do well.” And again, apropos of similar disturbances, she said: “The King talks like a father, but the people do not understand him; the people are hungry—it is the only thing which touches them.” Nothing in all this of contempt of the monarchy, of the sovereignty of the people, of the divine right of insurrection.
Manon Phlipon had in fact become, by the time she was twenty years of age, a thoroughly intelligent and reflective young woman. Instead of extravagant and impulsive opinions, results of excessive emotionalism and idealism, which her first twelve years seemed to prophesy, we have from her intelligent judgments. If it was not a question of some one she loved, she could be trusted to look at any subject in a rational and self-controlled way.
This change had been brought about largely by the reading and reflecting she had done since leaving the convent. For some time what she read had depended on what she could get. Her resolution to enter a convent eventually had made her at first prefer religious books, and she read Saint Augustine and Saint François de Sales with fervor and joy. With them she combined, helter-skelter, volumes from the bouquinistes, mainly travels, letters, and mythology. Fortunately she happened on Madame de Sévigné. Manon appreciated thoroughly the charming style of this most agreeable French letter-writer, and her taste was influenced by it, though her style was but little changed.