Fontanges.  O monseigneur, I always did so—­every time but once—­you quite make me blush.  Let us converse about something else, or I shall grow too serious, just as you made me the other day at the funeral sermon.  And now let me tell you, my lord, you compose such pretty funeral sermons, I hope I shall have the pleasure of hearing you preach mine.

Bossuet.  Rather let us hope, mademoiselle, that the hour is yet far distant when so melancholy a service will be performed for you.  May he who is unborn be the sad announcer of your departure hence![231] May he indicate to those around him many virtues not perhaps yet full-blown in you, and point triumphantly to many faults and foibles checked by you in their early growth, and lying dead on the open road you shall have left behind you!  To me the painful duty will, I trust, be spared:  I am advanced in age; you are a child.

Fontanges.  Oh, no!  I am seventeen.

Bossuet.  I should have supposed you younger by two years at least.  But do you collect nothing from your own reflection, which raises so many in my breast?  You think it possible that I, aged as I am, may preach a sermon on your funeral.  We say that our days are few; and saying it, we say too much.  Marie Angelique, we have but one:  the past are not ours, and who can promise us the future?  This in which we live is ours only while we live in it; the next moment may strike it off from us; the next sentence I would utter may be broken and fall between us.[232] The beauty that has made a thousand hearts to beat at one instant, at the succeeding has been without pulse and colour, without admirer, friend, companion, follower.  She by whose eyes the march of victory shall have been directed, whose name shall have animated armies at the extremities of the earth, drops into one of its crevices and mingles with its dust.  Duchess de Fontanges! think on this!  Lady! so live as to think on it undisturbed!

Fontanges.  O God!  I am quite alarmed.  Do not talk thus gravely.  It is in vain that you speak to me in so sweet a voice.  I am frightened even at the rattle of the beads about my neck:  take them off, and let us talk on other things.  What was it that dropped on the floor as you were speaking?  It seemed to shake the room, though it sounded like a pin or button.

Bossuet.  Leave it there!

Fontanges.  Your ring fell from your hand, my Lord Bishop!  How quick you are!  Could not you have trusted me to pick it up?

Bossuet.  Madame is too condescending:  had this happened, I should have been overwhelmed with confusion.  My hand is shrivelled:  the ring has ceased to fit it.  A mere accident may draw us into perdition; a mere accident may bestow on us the means of grace.  A pebble has moved you more than my words.

Fontanges.  It pleases me vastly:  I admire rubies.  I will ask the King for one exactly like it.  This is the time he usually comes from the chase.  I am sorry you cannot be present to hear how prettily I shall ask him:  but that is impossible, you know; for I shall do it just when I am certain he would give me anything.  He said so himself; he said but yesterday—­