itnessed with a select
company of acquaintance at an inn. The temperament of this presented
spectator, himself or herself a person of the scene, is always
reflected in the entertainment when the letter-writer is a sensitive
artist. So Horace Walpole's comedy varies according as it goes before
Sir Horace Mann in Florence or Lady Upper-Ossory at Ampthill; so, more
delicately, does Madame de Sevigne's. There are blacker strokes in
the dialogue when Bussy is to see the play; there is always idolatry
implied, and sometimes anxiety, if the spoilt child of Provence is the
audience. It is this _chere bonne_, this Madame de Grignan, nine times
out of ten, who is queen of the entertainment. You have to reckon with
her upon her throne of degrees, set up there like Hippolita, Duchess
of Athens, to be propitiated and, if possible, diverted. For her sake,
not for ours, her incomparable mother beckons from the wings character
after character, and gives each his cue, having set the scene with
her exquisite art. In a few cases her anxiety to please spoils the
effects. As we should say, she "laboured" the Cardinal de Retz. The
sour-faced beauty would have none of him. But that is a rare case, one
in which predilection betrayed her. Madame de Sevigne had a weakness
for the Cardinal. It is very seldom that the lightest hand in the
world fails her at a portrait. Her great successes are her thumb-nail
sketches: she will be remembered by Picard in the hayfield so long
as the world knows how to laugh. One of her best, because one of her
tenderest, is the _petite personne_.

The name is Charles de Sevigne's, but his mother takes it up after
him, and makes better play with it. Charles writes from Les Rochers in
December, 1675--Madame being really ill for once in her life with "a
nice little rheumatism," and Charles her amanuensis--"in the room of
la Plessis," that striving lady, too, was ill, or thought she was--"we
have had lately a very pretty young party (_une petite personne fort
jolie_) whose good looks don't at all remind us of that divinity. At
her instigation we have started _Reversis_: now, instead of knaves,
we talk about jacks." He adds a stroke too good to be lost, though his
mother might have left it out. "To give you a notion of her age and
quality, she has just confided to us that the day after Easter Eve was
a Tuesday. She thought that over, then said, 'No--it was a Monday!'
Then, judging by the look of us that that wouldn't do e