t is quite possible, too, that her
reserve concealed graces of character only apparent on a close intimacy.
But love does not wait for reasons, and this one had all the shades and
intensities of a passion, with few of its exactions. D'Andilly called
the mother a "pretty pagan," because she made such an idol of her
daughter. She sometimes has her own misgivings on the score of
religion. "I make this a little Trappe," she wrote from Livry, after the
separation. "I wish to pray to God and make a thousand reflections; but,
Ma pauvre chere, what I do better than all that is to think of you. ..
I see you, you are present to me, I think and think again of everything;
my head and my mind are racked; but I turn in vain, I seek in vain; the
dear child whom I love with so much passion is two hundred leagues away.
I have her no more. Then I weep without the power to help myself."
She rings the changes upon this inexhaustible theme. A responsive word
delights her; a brief silence terrifies her; a slight coldness plunges
her into despair. "I have an imagination so lively that uncertainty
makes me die," she writes. If a shadow of grief touches her idol, her
sympathies are overflowing. "You weep, my very dear child; it is an
affair for you; it is not the same thing for me, it is my temperament."

But though this love pulses and throbs behind all her letters, it does
not make up the substance of them. To amuse her daughter she gathers all
the gossip of the court, all the news of her friends; she keeps her au
courant with the most trifling as well as the most important events. Now
she entertains her with a witty description of a scene at Versailles, a
tragical adventure, a gracious word about Mme. Scarron, "who sups with
me every evening," a tender message from Mme. de La Fayette; now it is a
serious reflection upon the death of Turenne, a vivid picture of her own
life, a bit of philosophy, a spicy anecdote about a dying man who takes
forty cups of tea every morning, and is cured. A few touches lay bare a
character or sketch a vivid scene. It is this infinite variety of detail
that gives such historic value to her letters. In a correspondence so
intimate she has no interest to conciliate, no ends to gain. She is
simply a mirror in which the world about her is reflected.

But the most interesting thing we read in her letters is the life
and nature of the woman herself. She has a taste for society and for
seclusion, for gaiety and for thou