Her powerful mind had need of all the means of thought for its due exercise.

Theology, history, philosophy, music, painting, dancing, the exact sciences, chemistry, foreign tongues and learned languages, she learned all and desired more.

She herself formed her ideas from all the rays which the obscurity of her condition allowed to penetrate into the laboratory of her father.

She even secreted the books which the young apprentices brought and forgot for her in the workshop.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and the English philosophers, fell into her hands; but her real food was Plutarch.
"I shall never forget," she said, "the Lent of 1763, during which I every day carried that book to church, instead of the book of prayers: it was from this moment that I date the impressions and ideas which made me republican, when I had never formed a thought on the subject." After Plutarch, Fenelon made the deepest impression upon her.