rture 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