lery without malice, gaiety without
folly, propriety without constraint, and virtue without severity."

Her malicious cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, who was piqued by her indifference,
and basely wished to avenge himself, said that her "warmth was in
her intellect;" that for a woman of quality she was too badine, too
economical, too keenly alive to her own interests; that she made
too much account of a few trifling words from the queen, and was too
evidently flattered when the king danced with her. This opinion of a
vain and jealous man is not entitled to great consideration, especially
when we recall that he had already spoken of her as "the delight of
mankind," and said that antiquity would have dressed altars for her
and she would "surely have been goddess of something." The most
incomprehensible page in her history is her complaisance towards the
persistent impertinences of this perfidious friend. The only solution of
it seems to lie in the strength of family ties, and in her unwillingness
to be on bad terms with one of her very few near relatives.
Bussy-Rabutin was handsome, witty, brilliant, a bel esprit, a member of
the Academie Francaise, and very much in love with his charming cousin,
who clearly appreciated his talents, if not his character. "You are the
fagot of my intellect," she says to him; but she forbids him to talk
of love. Unfortunately for himself, his vanity got the better of his
discretion. He wrote the "Histoire Amoureuse des Gauls," and raised such
a storm about his head by his attack upon many fair reputations, that,
after a few months of lonely meditation in the Bastille, he was exiled
from Paris for seventeen years. Long afterwards he repented the
unkind blow he had given to Mme. de Sevigne, confessed its injustice,
apologized, and made his peace. But the world is less forgiving, and
wastes little sympathy upon the base but clever and ambitious man who
was doomed to wear his restless life away in the uncongenial solitude of
his chateau.

Among the numerous adorers of Mme. de Sevigne were the Prince de Conti,
the witty Comte de Lude, the poet Segrais, Fouquet, and Turenne. Her
friendship for the last two seems to have been the most lively and
permanent. We owe to her sympathetic pen the best account of the death
of Turenne. Her devotion to the interests of Fouquet and his family
lasted though the many years of imprisonment that ended only with his
life. There was nothing of the spirit of the courtier i