, "and
you are as delicious as your letters." Her own were as much sought in
her time, but she had no profound affection to consecrate them and no
children to collect them, so that only a few have been preserved. There
is a curious vein of philosophy in one she wrote to her husband, when
the pleasures of life began to fade. "As for myself, I care little for
the world; I find it no longer suited to my age; I have no engagements,
thank God, to retain me there. I have seen all there is to see. I have
only an old face to present to it, nothing new to show nor to discover
there. Ah! What avails it to recommence every day the visits, to trouble
one's self always about things that do not concern us? .... My dear sir,
we must think of something more solid." She disappears from the scene
shortly after the death of Mme. De Sevigne. Long years of silence and
seclusion, and another generation heard one day that she had lived and
that she was dead.

The friends of Mme. de Sevigne slip away one after another; La
Rochefoucauld, De Retz, Mme. de La Fayette are gone. "Alas!" she writes,
"how this death goes running about and striking on all sides." The
thought troubles her. "I am embarked in life without my consent," she
says; "I must go out of it--that overwhelms me. And how shall I go?
Whence: By what door? When will it be? In what disposition: How shall
I be with God? What have I to present to him? What can I hope?--Am I
worthy of paradise? Am I worthy of hell? What an alternative! What a
complication! I would like better to have died in the arms of my nurse."

The end came to her in the one spot where she would most have wished
it. She died while on a visit to her daughter in Provence. Strength
and resignation came with the moment, and she faced with calmness
and courage the final mystery. To the last she retained her wit, her
vivacity, and that eternal youth of the spirit which is one of the
rarest of God's gifts to man. "There are no more friends left to me,"
said Mme. de Coulanges; and later she wrote to Mme. de Grignan, "The
grief of seeing her no longer is always fresh to me. I miss too many
things at the Hotel de Carnavalet."

The curtain falls upon this little world which the magical pen of Mme.
de Sevigne has made us know so well. The familiar faces retreat into the
darkness, to be seen no more. But the picture lives, and the woman who
has outlined it so clearly, and colored it so vividly and so tenderly,
smiles upon us s