ter's health. "What calls far more for our
admiration than for our regrets," writes M. de Grignan to M. de
Coulanges, "is the spectacle of a brave woman facing death, of which she
had no doubt from the first days of her illness, with astounding firmness
and submission. This person, so tender and so weak towards all that she
loved, showed nothing but courage and piety when she believed that her
hour was come; and we could not but remark of what utility and of what
importance it is to have the mind stocked with good matter and holy
reading, for the which Madame de Sevigne had a liking, not to say a
wonderful hungering, from the use she managed to make of that good store
in the last moments of her life." She had often taken her daughter to
task for not being fond of books. "There is a certain person who
undoubtedly has plenty of wits, but of so nice and so fastidious a sort,
that she cannot read anything but five or six sublime works, which is a
sign of distinguished taste. She cannot bear historical books; a great
deprivation this, and of that which is a subsistence to everybody else.
She has another misfortune, which is, that she cannot read twice over
those choice books which she esteems exclusively. This person says that
she is insulted when she is told that she is not fond of reading: another
bone to pick." Madame de Sevigne's liking for good books accompanied her
to the last, and helped her to make a good end.

All the women who had been writers in her time died before Madame de
Sevigne. Madame de Motteville, a judicious and sensible woman, more
independent at the bottom of her heart than in externals, had died in
1689, exclusively occupied, from the time that she lost Queen Anne of
Austria, in works of piety and in drawing up her _Memoires_. Mdlle. de
Montpensier, "my great Mademoiselle," as Madame de Sevigne used to call
her, had died at Paris on the 5th of April, 1693, after a violent
illness, as feverish as her life. Impassioned and haughty, with her head
so full of her greatness that she did not marry in her youth, thinking
nobody worthy of her except the king and the emperor, who had no fancy
for her, and ending by a private marriage with the Duke of Lauzun, "a
cadet of Gascony," whom the king would not permit her to espouse
publicly; clever, courageous, hare-brained, generous, she has herself
sketched her own portrait. "I am tall, neither fat nor thin, of a very
fine and easy figure. I have a good mi