alike to
mind and body; and notwithstanding, during the whole of that time, and
in the unheard-of torments of her last illness, in which her sufferings
were increased to the utmost excess, she had not to repent of having
once wished for an easier death. Again and again did she suppress that
weak wish by uttering, so soon as she felt it arising, with the Saviour,
the prayer of the Sacred Mystery of the Garden, 'Father, thy will, not
mine, be done!'"

Such a sight must have moved the least susceptible--to have beheld the
Palatine thus redeem her past errors. She was anxious to write with her
own hand the account of her conversion, and addressed it to the
celebrated Rance, the Abbe of La Trappe. It was from that narrative that
Bossuet drew the source of his own. Some few years previously, with that
polished and elegant vein which intercourse with so many superior minds
tends to create, she had written, as though she had foreseen that she
would not despair of her spiritual future, a short but charming
panegyric upon Hope. Bussy-Rabutin has preserved this relic in one of
his letters. "I have never in my life," he says, with no doubt a little
too much enthusiasm, "seen anything better or more delicately written."
There is to be found in it, it is true, a happy inspiration and a
passage capable of pleasing minds struggling with difficulties. "It is
permitted to us," she says, "to measure our hope by our courage, it is
noble to sustain it amidst trials; but it is not less glorious to suffer
the entire ruin of it with the same high-heartedness which had dared to
conceive it." Those are noble sentiments, and revealing a vigorous
mental power. The end of the Princess Palatine (1681) showed clearly
that she had not, for the mere pleasure of expressing herself elegantly,
vaunted the delights of a saint-like hope. "Ready to render up her
soul," says Bossuet, "she was heard to utter in dying accents, 'I am
about to see how God will treat me, but I hope for His mercy.'" Such was
the close of that life, the piety of which illuminated its latter years;
such was the death of that Princess who, after having been remarkable
among the women of her time for her beauty, her errors, and, at last, by
her penitence, had the rare good fortune to be praised by the most
illustrious of historians, priests, and authors of the great century.

Our notice of this celebrated woman would be incomplete without a
passing glance at the singular fortunes of