in accordance with all this that Madame de Sable should
delight in fine scents, and we find that she did; for being threatened,
in her Port Royal days, when she was at an advanced age, with the loss of
smell, and writing for sympathy and information to Mere Agnes, who had
lost that sense early in life, she receives this admonition from the
stern saint: "You would gain by this loss, my very dear sister, if you
made use of it as a satisfaction to God, for having had too much pleasure
in delicious scents." Scarron describes her as

"La non pareille Bois-Dauphine,
_Entre dames perle tres fine_,"

and the superlative delicacy implied by this epithet seems to have
belonged equally to her personal habits, her affections, and her
intellect.

Madame de Sable's life, for anything we know, flowed on evenly enough
until 1640, when the death of her husband threw upon her the care of an
embarrassed fortune. She found a friend in Rene de Longueil, Seigneur de
Maisons, of whom we are content to know no more than that he helped
Madame de Sable to arrange her affairs, though only by means of
alienating from her family the estate of Sable, that his house was her
refuge during the blockade of Paris in 1649, and that she was not
unmindful of her obligations to him, when, subsequently, her credit could
be serviceable to him at court. In the midst of these pecuniary troubles
came a more terrible trial--the loss of her favorite son, the brave and
handsome Guy de Laval, who, after a brilliant career in the campaigns of
Conde, was killed at the siege of Dunkirk, in 1646, when scarcely
four-and-twenty. The fine qualities of this young man had endeared him
to the whole army, and especially to Conde, had won him the hand of the
Chancellor Seguire's daughter, and had thus opened to him the prospect of
the highest honors. His loss seems to have been the most real sorrow of
Madame de Sable's life. Soon after followed the commotions of the
Fronde, which put a stop to social intercourse, and threw the closest
friends into opposite ranks. According to Lenet, who relies on the
authority of Gourville, Madame de Sable was under strong obligations to
the court, being in the receipt of a pension of 2000 crowns; at all
events, she adhered throughout to the Queen and Mazarin, but being as far
as possible from a fierce partisan, and given both by disposition and
judgment to hear both sides of the question, she acted as a conciliator,
and retain