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