Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, for this was her maiden name, was born in Paris in the year 1754. Her father was an engraver. The daughter does not delineate him in her memoirs with such completeness as she has sketched her mother, but we can infer from the fleeting glimpses which she gives of him that he was a man of very considerable intellectual and physical force, but also of most irregular tendencies, which in his later years debased him to serious immoralities. He was a superior workman, discontented with his lot. He sought to better it by speculative operations outside his vocation. As his daughter expresses it, "he went in pursuit of riches, and met with ruin on his way." She also remarks of him, "that he could not be said to be a good man, but he had a great deal of what is called honor."
Her mother was evidently an angelic woman. Many passages in the memoirs indicate that she possessed uncommon intellectual endowments; but so exceeding were her virtues that, when her face rose to the daughter's view in the night of after years, and gazed compassionately on her through prison bars, the daughter, writing in the shadow of death, presents her in the light only of purest, noblest womanhood.
Marie was so precocious that she could not remember when she was unable to read. The first book she remembered reading was the Old and New Testament. Her early religious teaching was most sufficient, and was submitted to by a mind which, although practical and realistic, was always devout and somewhat affected by mystical, vague, and enthusiastic tendencies. She was a prodigy in the catechism, and was an agent of terror to the excellent priest who taught her and the other children, for she frequently confounded him in open class by questions which have vexed persons of maturest years. She was taught the harp, the piano, the guitar, and the violin. She was proficient in dancing. Such was her astonishing aptitude in all studies that she says, "I had not a single master who did not appear as much flattered by teaching me as I was grateful for being taught; nor one who, after attending me for a year or two, was not the first to say that his instructions were no longer necessary." It was her habit in childhood, after she had read any book, to lay it aside and reconstruct its contents by the processes of a most powerful memory, and while doing so, to meditate upon, analyze, and debate with it in the severest spirit of criticism and controversy.
When nine years of age she was reading Appian, the romances of Scarron, which disgusted and did not taint her; the memoirs of De Paites and of Madame de Montpensier. She mastered a treatise on heraldry so thoroughly that she corrected her father one day when she saw him engraving a seal inconformably to some minor rule of that art. She essayed a book on contracts, but it did not entice her to a complete perusal.
She took great delight in Plutarch, which she often carried to church instead of her missal. She read the "Candide" of Voltaire, Fénelon on the education of girls, and Locke on that of children. During all this time her mind was troubled by those unanswerable and saddening reflections upon those recondite theological subjects which often torture such children, and which grown up people are too often so forgetful of their own childhood that they fail to sympathize with them. She regarded with disapproval the transformation of the Devil into a serpent, and thought it cruel in God to permit it. Referring to the time when her first communion drew near, she writes: "I felt a sacred terror take possession of my soul."
She became profoundly humble and inexpressibly timid. As she grew older she learned that she was to live in a world of errors, sorrows, and sins, and the mere knowledge of their existence, by some peculiar process of her wonderful mind, seemed to be the signal for their combined attack upon her soul. She watched her thoughts until forbidden topics were generated in her mind by the very act of watchfulness. She then regarded herself as an accomplice with every profane image which invaded her innocent imagination. She subjected herself to physical mortifications and austerities of a whimsical yet severe character. She aspired to the fate of holy women of old, who had suffered martyrdom, and she finally resolved to enter a convent. She was then eleven years old. She was placed in such an institution ostensibly for further education, but with the intention on her part there to always remain. It was like entering the vestibule of heaven. She records of her first night there: "I lifted up my eyes to the heavens; they were unclouded and serene; I imagined that I felt the presence of the Deity smiling on my sacrifice, and already offering me a reward in the consolatory peace of a celestial abode."
She was always an acute observer and a caustic commentator, and she soon discovered that the cloister is not necessarily a celestial abode, and that its inmates do not inevitably enjoy consolatory peace. She found feminine spite there of the same texture with that wreaked by worldly women upon each other, and she notes the cruel taunts which good, old, ugly, and learned sister Sophia received from some stupid nuns, who, she says, "were fond of exposing her defects because they did not possess her talents." But her devotional fervor did not abate. She fainted under the feeling of awe in the act of her first communion, for she literally believed that her lips touched the very substance of her God, and thereafter she was long brooded over by that perfect peace which passeth understanding.
She remained there a year, when her destiny was changed by some domestic events which made her services necessary to her parents, and she returned home. Her resolution was unchanged, and she read and meditated deeply upon the Philotee of Saint Francis de Sales, upon the manual of Saint Augustine, and upon the polemical writings of Bossuet. But by this time the leaven of dissent began to work in that powerful intellect, for she remarks upon these works, that "favorable as they are to the cause which they defended, they sometimes let me into the secret of objections which might be made to it, and set me to scrutinizing the articles of my faith;" and she states that "this was the first step toward a skepticism at which I was destined to arrive after having been successively Jansenist, Cartesian, Stoic, and Deist." By this skepticism she doubtless meant merely skepticism as to creeds, for in her memoirs, written in daily expectation of death, and in most intense self-communion, she writes upon the great subjects of immortality, Deity, and providence in language of astonishing eloquence. "Can," she writes, "can the sublime idea of a Divine Creator, whose providence watches over the world, the immateriality of the soul and its immortality, that consolatory hope of persecuted virtue, be nothing more than amiable and splendid chimeras? But in how much obscurity are these difficult problems involved? What accumulated objections arise when we wish to examine them with mathematical rigor? No! it is not given to the human mind to behold these truths in the full day of perfect evidence; but why should the man of sensibility repine at not being able to demonstrate what he feels to be true? In the silence of the closet and the dryness of discussion, I can agree with the atheist or the materialist as to the insolubility of certain questions; but in the contemplation of nature my soul soars aloft to the, vivifying principle which animates it, to the intellect which pervades it, and to the goodness which makes it so glorious. Now, when immense walls separate me from all I love, when all the evils of society have fallen upon us together, as if to punish us for having desired its greatest blessings, I see beyond the limits of life the reward of our sacrifices. How, in what manner, I can not say. I only feel that so it ought to be." She read incongruously. Condillac, Voltaire, the Lives of the Fathers, Descartes, Saint Jerome, Don Quixote, Pascal, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui, and the French dramatists, were read, annotated, and commented on. She gives an appalling list of obsolete devotional books, which she borrowed of a pious abbé, and returned with marginal notes which shocked him. She read the Dictionnaire Philosophique, Diderot, D'Alembert, Raynal, Holbach, and took delight in the Epistles of Saint Paul. She was, while studying Malebranche and Descartes, so convinced, that she considered her kitten, when it mewed, merely a piece of mechanism in the exercise of its functions. The chilling negations and arid skepticism of Helvetius shocked her, and she writes: "I felt myself possessed of a generosity of soul of which he denied the existence." She concluded at this time that a republic is the true form of government, and that every other form is in derogation of man's natural rights.
She mastered Clairaut's geometry by copying the book, plates, and all, from beginning to end. She read Pufendorf's folio on the law of nature. She learned English, and read the life of Cromwell. She read the great French preachers, Bossuet, Flechier, Bourdaloue, and Massillon. She was vexed by the terrorism of their arguments. She thought that they overrated the importance of the devil. She did not believe him to be as powerful as they feared. She thought that they might teach oftener what seemed to her the potent element of Christian faith--love--and leave the devil out sometimes, and so she herself wrote a sermon on brotherly love, with which that personage had nothing to do, and in which his name was not even mentioned. She also read the Protestant preachers--Blair especially. She entangled herself in the acute skepticism of Bayle.
She seemed possessed of one of those assimilative intellects which extract by glances the substance from a book as the flash of lightning demagnetizes the lodestone. Her acquisitions were consequently immense. Though very yielding in the grasp of the mighty thinkers whom she encountered, yet she read them in the spirit of criticism, controversy, and dissent.