ft a portrait of her which
is equally ill-natured and entertaining, she built herself a house
adjoining the choir of the church of Port Royal, in the Faubourg St.
Jacques. Her friend, the Abbe d'Ailly, who edited her works after her
death in 1678, admits that she was "one of the greatest visionaries in
the world on the chapter of death." She herself expressed her
hypochondria otherwise: "I fear death more than other people do,
because no one has ever formed so clear a conception of nothingness as
I have." Ludicrous stories were told of her excessive fear of illness,
and in her fits of alarm she found comfort from the ministrations of
Antoine Singlin, who was the director of Pascal's conscience.[2] She
became intimate with Arnauld d'Andilly, and with the rest of those
Jansenist authors of whom Racine said that their works were "the
admiration of scholars and the consolation of all pious persons." But
she seems to have had the cleverness to observe that in one respect
the literature of Port Royal, as it expressed itself before "Les
Provinciales," had the fault of being verbose and redundant. Mme. de
Sable deserves more merit than seems to have been given to her for her
fervent cultivation of precise language.

[Footnote 2: It was of Singlin that Pascal wrote in 1654,
"Soumission total a J.C. et a mon directeur."]

As La Rochefoucauld's correspondence throws little light on the
character and person of its author at the time of his intellectual and
moral conversion, we turn with satisfaction to a document which owes
its existence to a social amusement, almost to a "parlour game." We
have seen that La Grande Mademoiselle, anxious to amuse the friends
whom she gathered round her in her _salon_ at the Luxembourg, hit upon
the notion of inducing her guests to produce written portraits of
themselves. You might say all the good of yourself you liked, on the
understanding that you put in the shades as well. The collection of
these self-portraits was actually printed in 1659, and is a work of
great value and interest to biographer and historian. It marks a new
movement of French intelligence, a critical excursion into psychology
not hitherto attempted in France, and some of the portraits are
marvellously delicate in their conscientious precision. Here, however,
we are not concerned with more than one of them, that which is signed
with the initials of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. It is his only
important composition pro