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