astes had been formed in this circle, and she had also
been under the instruction of the Chevalier de Mere, a litterateur and
courtier who had great vogue, was something of an oracle, and molded the
character and manners of divers women of this period, among others the
future Mme. de Maintenon. His confidence in his own power of bringing
talent out of mediocrity was certainly refreshing. Among his pupils was
the Duchesse de Lesdiguieres, who said to him one day, "I wish to have
esprit."--"Eh bien, Madame," replied the complaisant chevalier, "you
shall have it."

How much Mme. de Sable may have been indebted to this modest bel esprit
we do not know, but her finished manner, fine taste, exquisite tact,
cultivated intellect, and great experience of the world made her an
authority in social matters. To be received in her salon was to be
received everywhere. Cardinal Mazarin watched her influence with a
jealous eye. "Mme. de Longueville is very intimate with the Marquise de
Sable," he writes in his private note book. "She is visited constantly
by D'Andilly, the Princesse de Guemene, d'Enghien and his sister,
Nemours, and many others. They speak freely of all the world. It is
necessary to have some one who will advise us of all that passes there."

But the death of her favorite son--a young man distinguished for graces
of person, mind, heart, and character, who lost his life in one of the
battles of his friend and comrade, the Prince de Conde--together
with the loss of her fortune and the fading of her beauty, turned the
thoughts of the Marquise to spiritual things. We find many traces of the
state of mind which led her first into a mild form of devotion, serious
but not too ascetic, and later into pronounced Jansenism. In a note to
a friend who had neglected her, she dwells upon "the misery and
nothingness of the world," recalls the strength of their long
friendship, the depth of her own affection, and tries to account for the
disloyalty to herself, by the inherent weakness and emptiness of human
nature, which renders it impossible for even the most perfect to do
anything that is not defective. All this is very charitable, to say the
least, as well as a little abstract. Time has given a strange humility
and forgivingness to the woman who broke with her dearest friend, the
unfortunate Duc de Montmorency, because he presumed to lift his eyes
to the Queen, saying that she "could not receive pleasantly the regards
which she had