moral treatise of Nicole's"), a severe
Port-Royalist, in one and the same letter. But this is French; above
all, it is Madame de Sevigne. By the way, she and her friends, first and
last, "die" a thousand jolly deaths "with laughing."

A contemporary allusion to "Tartuffe," with more French manners
implied:--

The other day La Biglesse played Tartuffe to the life. Being at
table, she happened to tell a fib about some trifle or other, which
I noticed, and told her of it; she cast her eyes to the ground, and
with a very demure air, "Yes, indeed, madam," said she, "I am the
greatest liar in the world; I am very much obliged to you for
telling me of it. "We all burst out a-laughing, for it was exactly
the tone of Tartuffe,--"Yes, brother, I am a wretch, a vessel of
iniquity."

M. de La Rochefoucauld appears often by name in the letters. Here he
appears anonymously by his effect:--

"Warm affections are never tranquil"; a _maxim_.

Not a very sapid bit of gnomic wisdom, certainly. We must immediately
make up to our readers, on Madame de Sevigne's behalf, for the
insipidity of the foregoing "maxim" of hers, by giving here two or three
far more sententious excerpts from the letters, excerpts collected by
another:--

There may be so great a weight of obligation that there is no way
of being delivered from it but by ingratitude.

Long sicknesses wear out grief, and long hopes wear out joy.

Shadow is never long taken for substance; you must be, if you would
appear to be. The world is not unjust long.

Madame de Sevigne makes a confession, which will comfort readers who may
have experienced the same difficulty as that of which she speaks:--

I send you M. de Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," revised and corrected,
with additions; it is a present to you from himself. Some of them I
can make shift to guess the meaning of; but there are others that,
to my shame be it spoken, I cannot understand at all. God knows how
it will be with you.

What was it changed this woman's mood to serious? She could not have
been hearing Massillon's celebrated sermon on the "fewness of the
elect," for Massillon was yet only a boy of nine years; she may have
been reading Pascal's "Thoughts,"--Pascal had been dead ten years, and
the "Thoughts" had been published; or she may have been listening to one
of those sifting, heart-searching discourses of Bourdalo