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 sa