hom all
the subtleties of her friends the Port Royalists, and begged them to
"have the kindness, out of pity for her, to thicken their religion a
little as it evaporated in so much reasoning." As she grows older the
tone of seriousness is more perceptible. "If I could only live two
hundred years," she writes, "it seems to me that I might be an admirable
person." The rationalistic tendencies of Mme. de Grignan give her some
anxiety, and she rallies her often upon the doubtful philosophy of her
PERE DESCARTES. She could not admit a theory which pretended to
prove that her dog Marphise had no soul, and she insisted that if the
Cartesians had any desire to go to heaven, it was out of curiosity.
"Talk to the Cardinal (de Retz) a little of your MACHINES; machines
that love, machines that have a choice for some one, machines that are
jealous, machines that fear. ALLEZ, ALLEZ, you are jesting! Descartes
never intended to make us believe all that."

In her youth Mme. de Sevigne did not like the country because it was
windy and spoiled her beautiful complexion; perhaps, too, because it
was lonely. But with her happy gift of adaptation she came to love
its tranquillity. She went often to the solitary old family chateau in
Brittany to make economies and to retrieve the fortune which suffered
successively from the reckless extravagance of her husband and son,
and from the expensive tastes of the Comte de Grignan, who was acting
governor of Provence, and lived in a state much too magnificent for
his resources. Of her life at The Rocks she has left us many exquisite
pictures. "I go out into the pleasant avenues; I have a footman who
follows me; I have books, I change place, I vary the direction of my
promenade; a book of devotion, a book of history; one changes from one
to the other; that gives diversion; one dreams a little of God, of his
providence; one possesses one's soul, one thinks of the future."

She embellishes her park, superintends the planting of trees, and "a
labyrinth from which one could not extricate one's self without the
thread of Ariadne;" she fills her garden with orange trees and jessamine
until the air is so perfumed that she imagines herself in Provence. She
sits in the shade and embroiders while her son "reads trifles, comedies
which he plays like Moliere, verses, romances, tales; he is very
amusing, he has esprit, he is appreciative, he entertains us." She notes
the changing color of the leaves, the budding o