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In these memories of her solitary childhood, Bonaparte evokes the gradual coming to awareness of a brilliant child kept in ignorance of sexuality and reproduction. Motherless, she is brought up by a severe grandmother, who bluntly introduces her to menstruation. Because she was a girl and not a beauty, Bonaparte felt unloved by her father, and turned to boys' games in revenge. It is her sensuous Aunt Jeanne who introduces her to the feminine arsenal of perfumes and cosmetics. Bonaparte divides humanity into two groups: the 'civilized', or repressed (mainly women), and the 'non-civilized', with whom she identifies in the first stirrings of her sexuality. Nature gives her her first feelings of freedom. Literature and the theatre illuminate her further. Racine teaches her about passion. Operatic heroes arouse her first infatuations, and Molière's Tartuffe brings her to a greater awareness of the sexual act. It is only at 14 that Bonaparte is fully enlightened. At first she fears penetration as she had earlier feared childbirth, but then she accepts 'the law of nature'. In her early adolescence, Bonaparte already senses the magic power of words to recreate the world and longs for the immortality of the writer.