but Manon, disgusted with the Court, and impatiently awaiting the moment of departure, took more pleasure in looking at the statues in the gardens than at the personages in the palace. To her mother's inquiry if she were pleased with her visit, she answered, "Provided it is soon over; otherwise I shall detest these people so heartily that I shall not know what to do with my hatred." And to the question of what harm they had done, she replied, "To make me feel injustice and see absurdity." "A benevolent monarch," she wrote afterwards to Sophie, "appears to me almost adorable; but if, before my birth, I had been given the choice of a Government, I would have declared in favour of a Republic."
Once at home, Manon turned with renewed zest to her books. She became so interested in the study of geometry, that, being too poor to buy a certain treatise which had been lent her, she actually copied the whole of it. Presently a fresh disturbance from without was not without exercising a permanent influence on her mind. One day she was startled from her studies by the tramping of an excited crowd hurrying to the Place de la Grève (the place of execution), where two young parricides were condemned to suffer death by the wheel and the stake. People had crowded to the very roofs of houses to witness this appalling punishment. However much the girl shrank from the abominable sight, she could not shut out the shrieks of the wretches nor the smell of the burning faggots! Their cries were heard from her mother's bed, for one of the criminals lived for twelve hours on the wheel. All night this hideous occurrence racked her. However shocked at the crime, she was even more so at people who could find pleasure in such a sight. "In truth," she writes, "human
