o distrust the affection of others toward her, and to wait for
advances rather than to make them. We find many traces of this tendency
in the affectionate remonstrances addressed to her by Madame de
Longueville, now for shutting herself up from her friends, now for
doubting that her letters are acceptable. Here is a little passage from
one of these remonstrances which indicates a trait of Madame de Sable,
and is in itself a bit of excellent sense, worthy the consideration of
lovers and friends in general: "I am very much afraid that if I leave to
you the care of letting me know when I can see you, I shall be a long
time without having that pleasure, and that nothing will incline you to
procure it me, for I have always observed a certain lukewarmness in your
friendship after our _explanations_, from which I have never seen you
thoroughly recover; and that is why I dread explanations, for however
good they may be in themselves, since they serve to reconcile people, it
must always be admitted, to their shame, that they are at least the
effect of a bad cause, and that if they remove it for a time they
_sometimes leave a certain facility in getting angry again_, which,
without diminishing friendship, renders its intercourse less agreeable.
It seems to me that I find all this in your behavior to me; so I am not
wrong in sending to know if you wish to have me to-day." It is clear
that Madame de Sable was far from having what Sainte-Beuve calls the one
fault of Madame Necker--absolute perfection. A certain exquisiteness in
her physical and moral nature was, as we shall see, the source of more
than one weakness, but the perception of these weaknesses, which is
indicated in Madame de Longueville's letters, heightens our idea of the
attractive qualities which notwithstanding drew from her, at the sober
age of forty, such expressions as these: "I assure you that you are the
person in all the world whom it would be most agreeable to me to see, and
there is no one whose intercourse is a ground of truer satisfaction to
me. It is admirable that at all times, and amidst all changes, the taste
for your society remains in me; and, _if one ought to thank God for the
joys which do not tend to salvation_, I should thank him with all my
heart for having preserved that to me at a time in which he has taken
away from me all others."

Since we have entered on the chapter of Madame de Sable's weaknesses,
this is the place to mention what was