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