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.
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