The child, however, would forget himself, and relapse into his mad fits. When his preceptor was chiding him one day for a grave fault, he went so far as to say, “No, no, sir; I know who I am and what you are.” Fenelon made no reply; coldly and gravely he allowed the day to close and the night to pass without showing his pupil any sign of either resentment or affection. Next day the Duke of Burgundy was scarcely awake when his preceptor entered the room. “I do not know, sir,” said he, “whether you remember what you said to me yesterday, that you know what you are and what I am. It is my duty to teach you that you do not know either one or the other. You fancy yourself, sir, to be more than I; some lackeys, no doubt, have told you so, but I am not afraid to tell you, since you force me to it, that I am more than you. You have sense enough to understand that there is no question here of birth. You would consider anybody out of his wits who pretended to make a merit of it that the rain of heaven had fertilized his crops without moistening his neighbors. You would be no wiser if you were disposed to be vain of your birth, which adds nothing to your personal merit. You cannot doubt that I am above you in lights and knowledge. You know nothing but what I have taught you; and what I have taught you is nothing compared with what I might still teach you. As for authority, you have none over me; and I, on the contrary, have it fully and entirely over you; the king and Monseigneur have told you so often enough. You fancy, perhaps, that I think myself very fortunate to hold the office I discharge towards you; disabuse yourself once more, sir; I only took it in order to obey the king and give pleasure to Monseigneur, and not at all for the painful privilege of being your preceptor; and, that you may have no doubt about it, I am going to take you to his Majesty, and beg him to get you another one, whose pains I hope may be more successful than mine.” The Duke of Burgundy’s passion was past, and he burst into sobs. “Ah! sir,” he cried, “I am in despair at what took place yesterday; if you speak to the king, you will lose me his affection; if you leave me, what will be thought of me? I promise you. I promise you . . . that you shall be satisfied with me; but promise me . . .”

Fenelon promised nothing; he remained, and the foundation of his authority was laid forever in the soul of his pupil. The young prince did not forget what he was, but he had felt the superiority of his master. “I leave the Duke of Burgundy behind the door,” he was accustomed to say, “and with you I am only little Louis.”

God, at the same time with Fenelon, had taken possession of the Duke of Burgundy’s soul. “After his first communion, we saw disappearing little by little all the faults which, in his infancy, caused us great misgivings as to the future,” writes Madame de Maintenon. “His piety has caused such a metamorphosis that, from the passionate thing he was, he has become self-restrained, gentle, complaisant; one would say that that was his character, and that virtue was natural to him.” “All his mad fits and spites yielded at the bare name of God,” Fenelon used to say; “one day when he was in a very bad temper, and wanted to hide in his passion what he had done in his disobedience, I pressed him to tell me the truth before God; then he put himself into a great rage and bawled, ‘Why ask me before God? Very well, then, as you ask me in that way, I cannot deny that I committed that fault.’ He was as it were beside himself with excess of rage, and yet religion had such dominion over him that it wrung from him so painful an avowal.” “From this abyss,” writes the Duke of St. Simon, “came forth a prince affable, gentle, humane, self-restrained, patient, modest, humble, and austere towards himself, wholly devoted to his obligations and feeling them to be immense; he thought of nothing but combining the duties of a son and a subject with those to which he saw himself destined.”

“From this abyss” came forth also a prince singularly well informed, fond of study, with a refined taste in literature, with a passion for science; for his instruction Fenelon made use of the great works composed for his father’s education by Bossuet, adding thereto writings more suitable for his age; for him he composed the Fables and the Dialogues des Morts, and a Histoire de Charlemagne which has perished. In his stories, even those that were imaginary, he paid attention before everything to truth. “Better leave a history in all its dryness than enliven it at the expense of truth,” he would say. The suppleness and richness of his mind sufficed to save him from wearisomeness; the liveliness of his literary impressions communicated itself to his pupil. “I have seen,” says Fenelon in his letter to the French Academy, “I have seen a young prince, but eight years old, overcome with grief at sight of the peril of little Joash; I have seen him lose patience with the chief priest for concealing from Joash his name and his birth; I have seen him weeping bitterly as he listened to these verses:—

The soul and mind of Fenelon were sympathetic; Bossuet, in writing for the grand-dauphin, was responsive to the requirements of his own mind, never to those of the boy’s with whose education he had been intrusted.

Fenelon also wrote Telemaque. “It is a fabulous narrative,” he himself says, “in the form of an heroic poem, like Homer’s or Virgil’s, wherein I have set forth the principal actions that are meet for a prince whose birth points him out as destined to reign. I did it at a time when I was charmed with the marks of confidence and kindness showered upon me by the king; I must have been not only the most ungrateful but the most insensate of men to have intended to put into it satirical and insolent portraits; I shrink from the bare idea of such a design. It is true that I have inserted in these adventures all the verities necessary for government and all the defects that one can show in the exercise of sovereign power; but I have not stamped any of them with a peculiarity which would point to any portrait or caricature. The more the work is read, the more it will be seen that I wished to express everything without depicting anybody consecutively; it is, in fact, a narrative done in haste, in detached pieces and at different intervals; all I thought of was to amuse the Duke of Burgundy, and, whilst amusing, to instruct him, without ever meaning to give the work to the public.”

Telemaque was published, without any author’s name and by an indiscretion of the copyist’s, on the 6th of April, 1699. Fenelon was in exile at his diocese; public rumor before long attributed the work to him; the Maximes des Saints had just been condemned, Telemaque was seized, the printers were punished; some copies had escaped the police; the book was reprinted in Holland; all Europe read it, finding therein the allusions and undermeanings against which Fenelon defended himself. Louis XIV. was more than ever angry with the archbishop. “I cannot forgive M. de Cambrai for having composed the Telemaque,” Madame de Maintenon would say. Fenelon’s disgrace, begun by the Maximes des Saints touching absolute (pure) love, was confirmed by his ideal picture of kingly power. Chimerical in his theories of government, high-flown in his pious doctrines, Fenelon, in the conduct of his life as well as in his practical directions to his friends, showed a wisdom, a prudence, a tact which singularly belied the free speculations of his mind or his heart. He preserved silence amid the commendations and criticisms of the Telemaque. “I have no need and no desire to change my position,” he would say; “I am beginning to be old, and I am infirm; there is no occasion for my friends to ever commit themselves or to take any doubtful step on my account. I never sought out the court; I was sent for thither. I staid there nearly ten years without obtruding myself, without taking a single step on my own behalf, without asking the smallest favor, without meddling in any matter, and confining myself to answering conscientiously in all matters about which I was spoken to. I was dismissed; all I have to do is to remain at peace in my own place. I doubt not that, besides the matter of my condemned work, the policy of Telemaque was employed against me upon the king’s mind; but I must suffer and hold my tongue.”

Every tongue was held within range of King Louis XIV. It was only on the 22d of December, 1701, four years after Fenelon’s departure, that the Duke of Burgundy thought he might write to him in the greatest secrecy: “At last, my dear archbishop, I find a favorable opportunity of breaking the silence I have kept for four years. I have suffered many troubles since, but one of the greatest has been that of being unable to show you what my feelings towards you were during that time, and that my affection increased with your misfortunes, instead of being chilled by them. I think with real pleasure on the time when I shall be able to see you again, but I fear that this time is still a long way off. It must be left to the will of God, from whose mercy I am always receiving new graces. I have been many times unfaithful to Him since I saw you, but He has always done me the grace of recalling me to Him, and I have not, thank God, been deaf to His voice. I continue to study all alone, although I have not been doing so in the regular way for the last two years, and I like it more than ever. But nothing gives me more pleasure than metaphysics and ethics, and I am never tired of working at them. I have done some little pieces myself, which I should very much like to be in a position to send you, that you might correct them as you used to do my themes in old times. I shall not tell you here how my feelings revolted against all that has been done in your case, but we must submit to the will of God and believe that all has happened for our good. Farewell, my dear archbishop. I embrace you with all my heart; I ask your prayers and your blessing. —Louis.”

“I speak to you of God and yourself only,” answered Fenelon in a letter full of wise and tender counsels; “it is no question of me. Thank God, I have a heart at ease; my heaviest cross is that I do not see you, but I constantly present you before God in closer presence than that of the senses. I would give a thousand lives like a drop of water to see you such as God would have you.”

Next year, in 1702, the king gave the Duke of Burgundy the command of the army in Flanders. He wrote to Fenelon, “I cannot feel myself so near you without testifying my joy thereat, and, at the same time, that which is caused by the king’s permission to call upon you on my way; he has, however, imposed the condition that I must not see you in private. I shall obey this order, and yet I shall be able to talk to you as much as I please, for I shall have with me Saumery, who will make the third at our first interview after five years’ separation.” The archbishop was preparing to leave Cambrai so as not to be in the prince’s way; he now remained, only seeing the Duke of Burgundy, however, in the presence of several witnesses; when he presented him with his table-napkin at supper, the prince raised his voice, and, turning to his old master, said, with a touching reminiscence of his childhood’s passions, “I know what I owe you; you know what I am to you.”

The correspondence continued, with confidence and deference on the part of the prince, with tender, sympathetic, far-sighted, paternal interest on the part of the archbishop, more and more concerned for the perils and temptations to which the prince was exposed in proportion as he saw him nearer to the throne and more exposed to the incense of the world. “The right thing is to become the counsel of his Majesty,” he wrote to him on the death of the grand dauphin, “the father of the people, the comfort of the afflicted, the defender of the church; the right thing is to keep flatterers aloof and distrust them, to distinguish merit, seek it out and anticipate it, to listen to everything, believe nothing without proof, and, being placed above all, to rise superior to every one. The right thing is to desire to be father and not master. The right thing is not that all should be for one, but that one should be for all, to secure their happiness.” A solemn and touching picture of an absolute monarch, submitting to God and seeking His will alone. Fenelon had early imbued his pupil with the spirit of it; and the pupil appeared on the point of realizing it; but God at a single blow destroyed all these fair hopes. “All my ties are broken,” said Fenelon; “I live but on affection, and of affection I shall die; we shall recover ere long that which we have not lost; we approach it every day with rapid strides; yet a little while, and there will be no more cause for tears.” A week later he was dead, leaving amongst his friends, so diminished already by death, an immeasurable gap, and amongst his adversaries themselves the feeling of a great loss. “I am sorry for the death of M. de Cambrai,” wrote Madame de Maintenon on the 10th of January, 1715; “he was a friend I lost through Quietism, but it is asserted that he might have done good service in the council, if things should be pushed so far.” Fenelon had not been mistaken, when he wrote once upon a time to Madame de Maintenon, who consulted him about her defects, “You are good towards those for whom you have liking and esteem, but you are cold so soon as the liking leaves you; when you are frigid your frigidity is carried rather far, and, when you begin to feel mistrust, your heart is withdrawn too brusquely from those to whom you had shown confidence.”

Fenelon had never shown any literary prepossessions. He wrote for his friends or for the Duke of Burgundy, lavishing the treasures of his mind and spirit upon his letters of spiritual guidance, composing, in order to convince the Duke of Orleans, his Traite de l’Existence de Dieu, indifferent as to the preservation of the sermons he preached every Sunday, paying more attention to the plans of government he addressed to the young dauphin than to the publication of his works. Several were not collected until after his death. In delivering their eulogy of him at the French Academy, neither M. de Boze, who succeeded him, nor M. Dacier, director of the Academy, dared to mention the name of Telemaque. Clever (spirituel) “to an alarming extent” (faire peur) in the minutest detail of his writings, rich, copious, harmonious, but not without tendencies to lengthiness, the style of Fenelon is the reflex of his character; sometimes, a little subtle and covert, like the prelate’s mind, it hits and penetrates without any flash (eclat) and without dealing heavy blows. “Graces flowed from his lips,” said Chancellor d’Aguesseau, “and he seemed to treat the greatest subjects as if, so to speak, they were child’s play to him; the smallest grew to nobleness beneath his pen, and he would have made flowers grow in the midst of thorns. A noble singularity, pervading his whole person, and a something sublime in his very simplicity, added to his characteristics a certain prophet-like air. Always original, always creative, he imitated nobody, and himself appeared inimitable.” His last act was to write a letter to Father Le Tellier to be communicated to the king. “I have just received extreme unction; that is, the state, reverend father, when I am preparing to appear before God, in which I pray you with instance to represent to the king my true sentiments. I have never felt anything but docility towards the church and horror at the innovations which have been imputed to me. I accepted the condemnation of my book in the most absolute simplicity. I have never been a single moment in my life without feeling towards the king personally the most lively gratitude, the most genuine zeal, the most profound respect, and the most inviolable attachment. I take the liberty of asking of his Majesty two favors, which do not concern either my own person or anybody belonging to me. The first is, that he will have the goodness to give me a pious and methodical successor, sound and firm against Jansenism, which is in prodigious credit on this frontier. The other favor is, that he will have the goodness to complete with my successor that which could not be completed with me on behalf of the gentlemen of St. Sulpice. I wish his Majesty a long life, of which the church as well as the state has infinite need. If peradventure I go into the presence of God, I shall often ask these favors of Him.”

How dread is the power of sovereign majesty, operative even at the death-bed of the greatest and noblest spirits, causing Fenelon in his dying hour to be anxious about the good graces of a monarch ere long, like him, a-dying!

Our thoughts may well linger over those three great minds, Pascal, Bossuet, and Fenelon,—one layman and two bishops; all equally absorbed by the great problems of human life and immortality. With different degrees of greatness and fruitfulness, they all serve the same cause. Whether as defenders or assailants of Jansenism and Quietism, the solitary philosopher or the prelates engaged in the court or in the guidance of men, all three of them serving God on behalf of the soul’s highest interests, remained unique in their generation, and without successors as they had been without predecessors.

Leaving the desert and the church, and once more entering the world, we immediately encounter, amongst women, one, and one only, in the first rank—Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marchioness of Sevigne, born at Paris on the 5th of February, 1627, five months before Bossuet. Like a considerable number of women in Italy in the sixteenth century, and in France in the seventeenth, she had received a careful education. She knew Italian, Latin, and Spanish; she had for masters Menage and Chapelain; and she early imbibed a real taste for solid reading, which she owed to her leaning towards the Jansenists and Port-Royal. She was left a widow at five and twenty by the death of a very indifferent husband, and she was not disposed to make a second venture. Before getting killed in a duel, M. de Sevigne had made a considerable gap in the property of his wife, who, however, had brought him more than five hundred thousand livres. Madame de Sevigne had two children: she made up her mind to devote herself to their education, to restore their fortune, and to keep her love for them and for her friends. Of them she had many, often very deeply smitten with her; all remained faithful to her, and, she deserted none of them, though they might be put on trial and condemned like Fouquet, or perfidious and cruel like her cousin M. de Bussy-Rabutin. The safest and most agreeable of acquaintances, ever ready to take part in the joys as well as the anxieties of those whom she honored with her friendship, without permitting this somewhat superficial sympathy to agitate the depths of her heart, she had during her life but one veritable passion, which she admitted nobody to share with her. Her daughter, Madame de Grignan, the prettiest girl in France, clever, virtuous, business-like, appears in her mother’s letters fitful, cross-grained, and sometimes rather cold. Madame de Sevigne is a friend whom we read over and over again, whose emotions we share, to whom we go for an hour’s distraction and delightful chat. We have no desire to chat with Madame de Grignan; we gladly leave her to her mother’s exclusive affection, feeling infinitely obliged to her, however, for having existed, inasmuch as her mother wrote letters to her. Madame de Sevigne’s letters to her daughter are superior to all her other letters, charming as they are. When she writes to M. de Pomponne, to M. de Coulanges, to M. de Bussy, the style is less familiar, the heart less open, the soul less stirred. She writes to her daughter as she would speak to her; it is not letters, it is an animated and charming conversation, touching upon everything, embellishing everything with an inimitable grace. She gave her daughter in marriage to Count de Grignan in January, 1669; next year her son-in-law was appointed lieutenant- general of the king in Provence; he was to fill the place there of the Duke of Vendome, too young to discharge his functions as governor. In the month of January, 1671, M. de Grignan removed his wife to Aix: he was a Provencal, he was fond of his province, his castle of Grignan, and his wife. Madame de Sevigne found herself condemned to separation from the daughter whom she loved exclusively. “In vain I seek my darling daughter; I can no longer find her, and every step she takes removes her farther from me. I went to St. Mary’s, still weeping and still dying of grief; it seemed as if my heart and my soul were being wrenched from me; and, in truth, what a cruel separation! I asked leave to be alone: I was taken into Madame du Housset’s room, and they made me up a fire. Agnes sat looking at me without speaking: that was our bargain. I staid there till five o’clock, without ceasing to sob: all my thoughts were mortal, wounds to me. I wrote to M. de Grignan, you can imagine in what key. Then I went to Madame de La Fayette’s, who redoubled my griefs by the interest she took in them. She was alone, ill and distressed at the death of one of the nuns; she was just as I could have desired. I returned hither at eight; but when I came in, O! can you conceive what I felt as I mounted these stairs? That room into which I used always to go, alas! I found the doors of it open, but I saw everything disfurnished, everything disarranged, and your little daughter, who reminded me of mine. The wakenings of the night were dreadful; I think of you continuously: it is what devotees call an habitual thought, such as one should have of God, if one did one’s duty. Nothing gives me any distraction. I see that carriage, which is forever going on and will never come near me. I am forever on the highways; it seems as if I were afraid sometimes that the carriage will upset with me. The rains there have been for the last three days reduce me to despair; the Rhone causes me strange alarm. I have a map before my eyes, I know all the places where you sleep. This evening you are at Nevers; on Sunday you will be at Lyons, where you will receive this letter. I have received only two of yours; perhaps the third will come; that is the only comfort I desire: as for others, I seek for none.” During five and twenty years Madame de Sevigne could never become accustomed to her daughter’s absence. She set out for the Rochers, near Vitry, a family estate of M. de Sevigne’s. Her friend the Duke of Chaulnes was governor of Brittany. “You shall now have news of our states as your penalty for being a Breton. M. de Chaulnes arrived on Sunday evening, to the sound of everything that can make any in Vitry. On Monday morning he sent me a letter; I wrote back to say that I would go and dine with him. There are two dining-tables in the same room; fourteen covers at each table. Monsieur presides at one, Madame at the other. The good cheer is prodigious; joints are carried away quite untouched, and as for the pyramids of fruit, the doors require to be heightened. Our fathers did not foresee this sort of machine, indeed they did not even foresee that a door required to be higher than themselves. Well, a pyramid wants to come in, one of those pyramids which make everybody exclaim from one end of the table to the other; but so far from that boding damage, people are often, on the contrary, very glad not to see any more of what they contain. This pyramid, then, with twenty or thirty porcelain dishes, was so completely upset at the door, that the noise it made put to silence the violins, hautbois, and trumpets. After dinner, M. de Locmaria and M. de Coetlogon danced with two fair Bretons some marvellous jigs (passe pipeds) and some minuets in a style that the court-people cannot approach; wherein they do the Bohemian and Breton step with a neatness and correctness which are charming. I was thinking all the while of you, and I had such tender recollections of your dancing and of what I had seen you dance, that this pleasure became a pain to me. The States are sure not to be long; there is nothing to do but to ask for what the king wants; nobody says a word, and it is all done. As for the governor, he finds, somehow or other, more than forty thousand crowns coming in to him. An infinity of presents, pensions, repairs of roads and towns, fifteen or twenty grand dinner-parties, incessant play, eternal balls, comedies three times a week, a great show of dress, that is the States. I am forgetting three or four hundred pipes of wine which are drunk; but, if I did not reckon this little item, the others do not forget it, and put it first. This is what is called the sort of twaddle to make one go to sleep on one’s feet; but it is what comes to the tip of your pen when you are in Brittany and have nothing else to say.”

Even in Brittany and at the Rochers, Madame de Sevigne always has something to say. The weather is frightful; she is occupied a good deal in reading the romances of La Calprenede and the Grand Cyrus, as well as the Ethics of Nicole. “For four days it has been one continuous tempest; all our walks are drowned; there is no getting out any more. Our masons, our carpenters keep their rooms; in short, I hate this country, and I yearn every moment for your sun; perhaps you yearn for my rain; we do well, both of us. I am going on with the Ethics of Nicole, which I find delightful; it has not yet given me any lesson against the rain, but I am expecting it, for I find everything there, and conformity to the will of God might answer my purpose, if I did not want a specific remedy. In fact, I consider this an admirable book; nobody has written as these gentlemen have, for I put down to Pascal half of all that is beautiful. It is so nice to have one’s self and one’s feelings talked about, that, though it be in bad part, one is charmed by it. What is called searching the depths of the heart with a lantern is exactly what he does; he discloses to us that which we feel every day, but have not the wit to discern or the sincerity to avow. I have even forgiven the swelling in the heart (l’enflure du coeur) for the sake of the rest, and I maintain that there is no other word to express vanity and pride, which are really wind: try and find another word. I shall complete the reading of this with pleasure.”

Here we have the real Madame de Sevigne, whom we love, on whom we rely, who is as earnest as she is amiable and gay, who goes to the very core of things, and who tells the truth of herself as well as of others. “You ask me, my dear child, whether I continue to be really fond of life. I confess to you that I find poignant sorrows in it, but I am even more disgusted with death; I feel so wretched at having to end all this thereby, that, if I could turn back again, I would ask for nothing better. I find myself under an obligation which perplexes me: I embarked upon life without my consent, and I must go out of it; that overwhelms me. And how shall I go? Which way? By what door? When will it be? In what condition? Shall I suffer a thousand, thousand pains, which will make me die desperate? Shall I have brain-fever? Shall I die of an accident? How shall I be with God? What shall I have to show Him? Shall fear, shall necessity bring me back to Him? Shall I have no sentiment but that of dread? What can I hope? Am I worthy of heaven? Am I worthy of hell? Nothing is such madness as to leave one’s salvation in uncertainty, but nothing is so natural; and the stupid life I lead is the easiest thing in the world to understand. I bury myself in these thoughts, and I find death so terrible, that I hate life more because it leads me thereto than because of the thorns with which it is planted. You will say that I want to live forever then: not at all; but, if my opinion had been asked, I should have preferred to die in my nurse’s arms; that would have removed me from vexations of spirit, and would have given me Heaven full surely and easily.”

Madame de Sevigne would have very much scandalized those gentlemen of Port-Royal, if she had let them see into the bottom of her heart as she showed it to her daughter. Pascal used to say, “There are but three sorts of persons: those who serve God, having found Him; those who employ themselves in seeking Him, not having found Him; and those who live without seeking Him or having found Him. The first are reasonable and happy; the last are mad and miserable; the intermediate are miserable and reasonable.” Without ever having sought and found God, in the absolute sense intended by Pascal, Madame de Sevigne kept approaching Him by gentle degrees. “We are reading a treatise by M. Namon of Port-Royal on continuous prayer; though he is a hundred feet above my head, he nevertheless pleases and charms us. One is very glad to see that there have been and still are in the world people to whom God communicates His Holy Spirit in such abundance; but, O God! when shall we have some spark, some degree of it? How sad to find one’s self so far from it, and so near to something else! O, fie! Let us not speak of such plight as that: it calls for sighs, and groans, and humiliations a hundred times a day.”

After having suffered so much from separation, and so often traversed France to visit her daughter in Provence, Madame de Sevigne had the happiness to die in her house at Grignan. She was sixty-nine, and she had been ill for some time; she was subject to rheumatism; her son’s wildness had for a long while retarded the arrangement of her affairs; at last he had turned over a new leaf, he was married, he was a devotee. Madame de Grignan had likewise found a wife for her son, whom the king had made a colonel at a very early age; and a husband for her daughter, little Pauline, now Madame de Simiane. “All this together is extremely nice, and too nice,” wrote Madame de Sevigne to M. de Bussy, “for I find the days going so fast, and the months and the years, that, for my part, my dear cousin, I can no longer hold them. Time flies, and carries me along in spite of me; it is all very fine for me to wish to stay it, it bears me away with it, and the idea of this causes me great fear; you will make a pretty shrewd guess why.” Death came at last, and Madame de Sevigne lost all her terrors. She was attacked by small-pox whilst her sick daughter was confined to her bed, and died on the 19th of April, 1696, thanking God that she was the first to go, after having so often trembled for her daughter’s health. “What calls far more for our admiration than for our regrets,” writes M. de Grignan to M. de Coulanges, “is the spectacle of a brave woman facing death, of which she had no doubt from the first days of her illness, with astounding firmness and submission. This person, so tender and so weak towards all that she loved, showed nothing but courage and piety when she believed that her hour was come; and we could not but remark of what utility and of what importance it is to have the mind stocked with good matter and holy reading, for the which Madame de Sevigne had a liking, not to say a wonderful hungering, from the use she managed to make of that good store in the last moments of her life.” She had often taken her daughter to task for not being fond of books. “There is a certain person who undoubtedly has plenty of wits, but of so nice and so fastidious a sort, that she cannot read anything but five or six sublime works, which is a sign of distinguished taste. She cannot bear historical books; a great deprivation this, and of that which is a subsistence to everybody else. She has another misfortune, which is, that she cannot read twice over those choice books which she esteems exclusively. This person says that she is insulted when she is told that she is not fond of reading: another bone to pick.” Madame de Sevigne’s liking for good books accompanied her to the last, and helped her to make a good end.

All the women who had been writers in her time died before Madame de Sevigne. Madame de Motteville, a judicious and sensible woman, more independent at the bottom of her heart than in externals, had died in 1689, exclusively occupied, from the time that she lost Queen Anne of Austria, in works of piety and in drawing up her Memoires. Mdlle. de Montpensier, “my great Mademoiselle,” as Madame de Sevigne used to call her, had died at Paris on the 5th of April, 1693, after a violent illness, as feverish as her life. Impassioned and haughty, with her head so full of her greatness that she did not marry in her youth, thinking nobody worthy of her except the king and the emperor, who had no fancy for her, and ending by a private marriage with the Duke of Lauzun, “a cadet of Gascony,” whom the king would not permit her to espouse publicly; clever, courageous, hare-brained, generous, she has herself sketched her own portrait. “I am tall, neither fat nor thin, of a very fine and easy figure. I have a good mien, arms and hands not beautiful, but a beautiful skin and throat too. I have a straight leg and a well-shaped foot; my hair is light, and of a beautiful auburn; my face is long, its contour is handsome, nose large and aquiline; mouth neither large nor small, but chiselled, and with a very pleasing expression; lips vermilion; teeth not fine, but not frightful either. My eyes are blue, neither large nor small, but sparkling, soft, and proud, like my mien. I talk a great deal, without saying silly things or using bad words. I am a very vicious enemy, being very choleric and passionate, and that, added to my birth, may well make my enemies tremble; but I have also a noble and a kindly soul. I am incapable of any base and black deed; and so I am more disposed to mercy than to justice. I am melancholic; I like reading good and solid books; trifles bore me, except verses, and them I like, of whatever sort they may be, and undoubtedly I am as good a judge of such things as if I were a scholar.”

A few days after Mademoiselle, died, likewise at Paris, Madelaine de la Vergne, Marchioness of La Fayette, the most intimate friend of Madame de Sevigne. “Never did we have the smallest cloud upon our friendship,” the latter would say; “long habit had not made her merit stale to me, the flavor of it was always fresh and new; I paid her many attentions from the mere prompting of my heart, without the propriety to which we are bound by friendship having anything to do with it. I was assured, too, that I constituted her dearest consolation, and for forty years past it had always been the same thing.” Sensible, clever, a sweet and safe acquaintance, Madame de La Fayette was as simple and as true in her relations with her confidantes as in her writings. La Princesse de Olives alone has outlived the times and the friends of Madame de La Fayette. Following upon the “great sword-thrusts” of La Calprenede or Mdlle. de Scudery, this delicate, elegant, and virtuous tale, with its pure and refined style, enchanted the court, which recognized itself at its best, and painted under its brightest aspect; it was farewell forever to the “Pays de Tendre.” Madame de La Fayette had very bad health; she wrote to Madame de Sevigne on the 14th of July, 1693, “Here is what I have done since I wrote to you last. I have had two attacks of fever; for six months I had not been purged; I am purged once, I am purged twice; the day after the second time, I sit down to table. O, dear! I feel a pain in my heart; I do not want any soup. Have a little meat then. No, I do not want any. Well, you will have some fruit. I think I will. Very well, then, have some. I don’t know, I think I will have something by and by; let me have some soup and a chicken this evening. Here is the evening, and there are the soup and the chicken: I don’t want them. I am nauseated; I will go to bed; I prefer sleeping to eating. I go to bed, I turn round, I turn back, I have no pain, but I have no sleep either. I call, I take a book, I shut it up. Day comes, I get up, I go to the window. It strikes four, five, six; I go to bed again, I doze till seven, I get up at eight, I sit down to table at twelve, to no purpose, as yesterday. I lay myself down in my bed again in the evening, to no purpose, as the night before. Are you ill? Nay. I am in this state for three days and three nights. At present I am getting some sleep again, but I still eat merely mechanically, horse-wise, rubbing my mouth with vinegar otherwise I am very well, and I haven’t even so much pain in the head.” Fault was found with Madame de La Fayette for not going out. “She had a mortal melancholy. What absurdity again! Is she not the most fortunate woman in the world? That is what people said,” writes Madame de Sevigne; “it needed that she should be dead to prove that she had good reason for not going out, and for being melancholy. Her reins and her heart were all gone was not that enough to cause those fits of despondency of which she complained? And so, during her life, she showed reason, and after death she showed reason, and never was she without that divine reason which was her principal gift.”

Madame de La Fayette had in her life one great sorrow, which had completed the ruin of her health. On the 16th of March, 1680, after the closest and longest of intimacies, she had lost her best friend, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. Carried away in his youth by party strife and an ardent passion for Madame de Longueville, he had at a later period sought refuge in the friendship of Madame de La Fayette. “When women have well-formed minds,” he would say, “I like their conversation better than that of men; you find with them a certain gentleness which is not met with amongst us, and it seems to me, besides, that they express themselves with greater clearness, and that they give a more pleasant turn to the things they say.” A meddler and intriguer during the Fronde, sceptical and bitter in his Maximes, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld was amiable and kindly in his private life. Factions and the court had taught him a great deal about human nature; he had seen it and judged of it from its bad side. Witty, shrewd, and often profound, he was too severe to be just. The bitterness of his spirit breathed itself out completely in his writings; he kept for his friends that kindliness and that sensitiveness of which he made sport. “He gave me wit,” Madame de La Fayette would say, “but I reformed his heart.” He had lost his son at the passage of the Rhine, in 1672. He was ill, suffering cruelly. “I was yesterday at M. de La Rochefoucauld’s,” writes Madame de Sevigne, in 1680. “I found him uttering loud shrieks; his pain was such that his endurance was quite overcome without a single scrap remaining. The excessive pain upset him to such a degree that he was sitting out in the open air with a violent fever upon him. He begged me to send you word, and to assure you that the wheel-broken do not suffer during a single moment what he suffers one half of his life, and so he wishes for death as a happy release.” He died with Bossuet at his pillow. “Very well prepared as regards his conscience,” says Madame de Sevigne again; “that is all settled; but, in other respects, it might be the illness and death of his neighbor which is in question, he is not flurried about it, he is not troubled about it. Believe me, my daughter, it is not to no purpose that he has been making reflections all his life; he has approached his last moments in such wise that they have had nothing that was novel or strange for him.” M. de La Rochefoucauld thought worse of men than of life. “I have scarcely any fear of things,” he had said; “I am not at all afraid of death.” With all his rare qualities and great opportunities he had done nothing but frequently embroil matters in which he had meddled, and had never been anything but a great lord with a good deal of wit. Actionless penetration and sceptical severity may sometimes clear the judgment and the thoughts, but they give no force or influence that has power over men. “There was always a something (je ne sais quoi) about M. de La Rochefoucauld,” writes Cardinal de Retz, who did not like him; “he was for meddling in intrigues from his childhood, and at a time when he had no notion of petty interests, which were never his foible, and when he did not understand great ones, which, on the other hand, were never his strength. He was never capable of doing anything in public affairs, and I am sure I don’t know why. His views were not sufficiently broad, and he did not even see comprehensively all that was within his range, but his good sense,—very good, speculatively,—added to his suavity, his insinuating style, and his easy manners, which are admirable, ought to have compensated more than it did for his lack of penetration. He always showed habitual irresolution, but I really do not know to what to attribute this irresolution; it could not, with him, have come from the fertility of his imagination, which is anything but lively. He was never a warrior, though he was very much the soldier. He was never a good partyman, though he was engaged in it all his life. That air of bashfulness and timidity which you see about him in private life was turned in public life into an air of apology. He always considered himself to need one, which fact, added to his maxims, which do not show sufficient belief in virtue, and to his practice, which was always to get out of affairs with as much impatience as he had shown to get into them, leads me to conclude that he would have done far better to know his own place, and reduce himself to passing, as he might have passed, for the most polite of courtiers and the worthiest (le plus honnete) man, as regards ordinary life, that ever appeared in his century.”

Cardinal de Retz had more wits, more courage, and more resolution than the Duke of La Rochefoucauld; he was more ambitious and more bold; he was, like him, meddlesome, powerless, and dangerous to the state. He thought himself capable of superseding Cardinal Mazarin, and far more worthy than he of being premier minister; but every time he found himself opposed to the able Italian he was beaten. All that he displayed, during the Fronde, of address, combination, intrigue, and resolution, would barely have sufficed to preserve his name in history, if he had not devoted his leisure in his retirement to writing his Memoires. Vigorous, animated, always striking, often amusing, sometimes showing rare nobleness and high-mindedness, his stories and his portraits transport us to the very midst of the scenes he desires to describe and the personages he makes the actors in them. His rapid, nervous, picturesque style is the very image of that little dark, quick, agile man, more soldier than bishop, and more intriguer than soldier, faithfully and affectionately beloved by his friends, detested by his very numerous enemies, and dreaded by many people, for the causticity of his tongue, long after the troubles of the Fronde had ceased, and he was reduced to be a wanderer in foreign lands, still Archbishop of Paris without being able to set foot in it. Having retired to Commercy, he fell under Louis XIV.‘s suspicion. Madame de Sevigne, who was one of his best friends, was anxious about him. “As to our cardinal, I have often thought as you,” she wrote to her daughter; “but, whether it be that the enemies are not in a condition to cause fear, or that the friends are not subject to take alarm, it is certain that there is no commotion. You show a very proper spirit in being anxious about the welfare of a person who is so distinguished, and to whom you owe so much affection.” “Can I forget him whom I see everywhere in the story of our misfortunes,” exclaimed Bossuet, in his funeral oration over Michael Le Tellier, “that man so faithful to individuals, so formidable to the state, of a character so high that he could not be esteemed, or feared, or hated by halves, that steady genius whom, the while he shook the universe, we saw attracting to himself a dignity which in the end he determined to relinquish as having been too dearly bought, as he had the courage to recognize in the place that is the most eminent in Christendom, and as being, after all, quite incapable of satisfying his desires, so conscious was he of his mistake and of the emptiness of human greatness? But, so long as he was bent upon obtaining what he was one day to despise, he kept everything moving by means of powerful and secret springs, and, after that all parties were overthrown, he seemed still to uphold himself alone, and alone to still threaten the victorious favorite with his sad but fearless gaze.” When Bossuet sketched this magnificent portrait of Mazarin’s rival, Cardinal de Retz had been six years dead, in 1679.

Mesdames de Sevigne and de La Fayette were of the court, as were the Duke of La Rochefoucauld and Cardinal de Retz. La Bruyere lived all his life rubbing shoulders with the court; he knew it, he described it, but he was not of it, and could not be of it. Nothing is known of his family. He was born at Dourdan in 1639, and had just bought a post in the Treasury (tresorier de France) at Caen, when Bossuet, who knew him, induced him to remove to Paris as teacher of history to the duke, grandson of the great Conde. He remained forever attached to the person of the prince, who gave him a thousand crowns a year, and he lived to the day of his death at Conde’s house. “He was a philosopher,” says Abbe d’Olivet in his Histoire de l’Academie Francaise; “all he dreamt of was a quiet life, with his friends and his books, making a good choice of both; not courting or avoiding pleasure; ever inclined for moderate fun, and with a talent for setting it going; polished in manners, and discreet in conversation; dreading every sort of ambition, even that of displaying wit.” This was not quite the opinion formed by Boileau of La Bruyere. “Maximilian came to see me at Auteuil,” writes Boileau to Racine on the 19th of May, 1687, the very year in which the Caracteres was published; “he read me some of his Theophrastus. He is a very worthy (honnete) man, and one who would lack nothing, if nature had created him as agreeable as he is anxious to be. However, he has wit, learning, and merit.” Amidst his many and various portraits, La Bruyere has drawn his own with an amiable pride. “I go to your door, Ctesiphon; the need I have of you hurries me from my bed and from my room. Would to Heaven I were neither your client nor your bore. Your slaves tell me that you are engaged and cannot see me for a full hour yet; I return before the time they appointed, and they tell me that you have gone out. What can you be doing, Ctesiphon, in that remotest part of your rooms, of so laborious a kind as to prevent you from seeing me? You are filing some bills, you are comparing a register; you are signing your name, you are putting the flourish. I had but one thing to ask you, and you had but one word to reply: yes or no. Do you want to be singular? Render service to those who are dependent upon you, you will be more so by that behavior than by not letting yourself be seen. O man of importance and overwhelmed with business, who in your turn have need of my offices, come into the solitude of my closet; the philosopher is accessible; I shall not put you off to another day. You will find me over those works of Plato which treat of the immortality of the soul and its distinctness from the body; or with pen in hand, to calculate the distances of Saturn and Jupiter. I admire God in His works, and I seek by knowledge of the truth to regulate my mind and become better. Come in, all doors are open to you; my antechamber is not made to wear you out with waiting for me; come right in to me without giving me notice. You bring me something more precious than silver and gold, if it be an opportunity of obliging you. Tell me, what can I do for you? Must I leave my books, my study, my work, this line I have just begun? What a fortunate interruption for me is that which is of service to you!”