ghted up by
her passionate love of her daughter, and in this light we read the
many-sided life of her time for twenty-five years. Mme. de La Fayette
takes the world more seriously, and replaces the playful fancy of her
friend by a richer vein of imagination and sentiment. She sketches for
us the court of which Madame (title given to the wife of the king's
brother) is the central figure--the unfortunate Princes Henrietta whom
she loved so tenderly, and who died so tragically in her arms. She
writes novels too; not profound studies of life, but fine and exquisite
pictures of that side of the century which appealed most to her poetic
sensibility. We follow the leading characters of the age through the
ten-volume romances of Mlle. de Scudery, which have mostly long since
fallen into oblivion. Doubtless the portraits are a trifle rose-colored,
but they accord, in the main, with more veracious history. The Grande
Mademoiselle describes herself and her friends, with the curious naivete
of a spoiled child who thinks its smallest experiences of interest to
all the world. Mme. de Maintenon gives us another picture, more serious,
more thoughtful, but illuminated with flashes of wonderful insight.

Most of these women wrote simply to amuse themselves and their friends.
It was only another mode of their versatile expression. With rare
exceptions, they were not authors consciously or by intention. They
wrote spontaneously, and often with reckless disregard of grammar and
orthography. But the people who move across their gossiping pages are
alive. The century passes in review before us as we read. The men and
women who made its literature so brilliant and its salons so famous,
become vivid realities. Prominent among the fair faces that look out
upon us at every turn, from court and salon, is that of the Duchesse de
Longueville, sister of the Grand Conde, and heroine of the Fronde. Her
lovely blue eyes, with their dreamy languor and "luminous awakenings,"
turn the heads alike of men and women, of poet and critic, of statesman
and priest. We trace her brief career through her pure and ardent youth,
her loveless marriage, her fatal passion for La Rochefoucauld, the final
shattering of all her illusions; and when at last, tired of the world,
she bows her beautiful head in penitent prayer, we too love and forgive
her, as others have done. Were not twenty-five years of suffering and
penance an ample expiation? She was one of the three women