gentlemen of
Port-Royal, if she had let them see into the bottom of her heart as she
showed it to her daughter. Pascal used to say, "There are but three
sorts of persons: those who serve God, having found Him; those who employ
themselves in seeking Him, not having found Him; and those who live
without seeking Him or having found Him. The first are reasonable and
happy; the last are mad and miserable; the intermediate are miserable and
reasonable." Without ever having sought and found God, in the absolute
sense intended by Pascal, Madame de Sevigne kept approaching Him by
gentle degrees. "We are reading a treatise by M. Namon of Port-Royal on
continuous prayer; though he is a hundred feet above my head, he
nevertheless pleases and charms us. One is very glad to see that there
have been and still are in the world people to whom God communicates His
Holy Spirit in such abundance; but, O God! when shall we have some
spark, some degree of it? How sad to find one's self so far from it, and
so near to something else! O, fie! Let us not speak of such plight as
that: it calls for sighs, and groans, and humiliations a hundred times a
day."

After having suffered so much from separation, and so often traversed
France to visit her daughter in Provence, Madame de Sevigne had the
happiness to die in her house at Grignan. She was sixty-nine, and she
had been ill for some time; she was subject to rheumatism; her son's
wildness had for a long while retarded the arrangement of her affairs;
at last he had turned over a new leaf, he was married, he was a devotee.
Madame de Grignan had likewise found a wife for her son, whom the king
had made a colonel at a very early age; and a husband for her daughter,
little Pauline, now Madame de Simiane. "All this together is extremely
nice, and too nice," wrote Madame de Sevigne to M. de Bussy, "for I find
the days going so fast, and the months and the years, that, for my part,
my dear cousin, I can no longer hold them. Time flies, and carries me
along in spite of me; it is all very fine for me to wish to stay it, it
bears me away with it, and the idea of this causes me great fear; you
will make a pretty shrewd guess why." Death came at last, and Madame de
Sevigne lost all her terrors. She was attacked by small-pox whilst her
sick daughter was confined to her bed, and died on the 19th of April,
1696, thanking God that she was the first to go, after having so often
trembled for her daugh