This young girl, this future Heloise of the eighteenth century, who read serious books, who expounded the circles of the celestial globe, handled the pencil and _burin_, and in whose soul-aspiring thoughts and impassioned feelings already found space, was often called into the kitchen to prepare the vegetables for dinner.

This mixture of serious shades, elegant research, and domestic occupations, ordered and sensibly mingled by her mother's sagacity, seemed to prepare her already for the vicissitudes of fortune, and in after days helped her to support them.

It was Rousseau at Charmettes piling up the woodstack of Madame de Warens with the hand which was to write the _Contrat Social_, or Philopoemen chopping his wood.
VI.
From the retirement of such secluded life, she sometimes perceived the higher world which shone above her.

The lights which displayed to her this great world offended, more than they dazzled, her sight.

The pride of this aristocratic society, which saw without valuing her, weighed on her sensitive mind--a society in which her position was not assigned to her, seemed badly framed.