se in the matter of piety." There was certainly
less of the ascetic in Mme. de La Fayette. She had more color and also
more sincerity. In symmetry of character, in a certain feminine quality
of taste and tenderness, she was superior, and she seems to me to
have been of more intrinsic value as a woman. Whether under the same
conditions she would have attained the same power may be a question.
If not, I think it would have been because she was unwilling to pay the
price, not because she lacked the grasp, the tact, or the diplomacy.

It is mainly as a woman of letters that Mme. de La Fayette is known
today, and it was through her literary work that she made the strongest
impression upon her time. Boileau said that she had a finer intellect
and wrote better than any other woman in France. But she wrote only for
the amusement of idle or lonely hours, and always avoided any display of
learning, in order not to attract jealousy as well as from instinctive
delicacy of taste. "He who puts himself above others," she said,
"whatever talent he may possess, puts himself below his talent." But
her natural atmosphere was an intellectual one, and the friend of La
Rochefoucauld, who would have "liked Montaigne for a neighbor," had her
own message for the world. Her mind was clear and vigorous, her taste
critical and severe, and her style had a flexible quality that readily
took the tone of her subject. In concise expression she doubtless
profited much from the author of the MAXIMS, who rewrote many of his
sentences at least thirty times. "A phrase cut out of a book is worth a
louis d'or," she said, "and every word twenty sous." Unfortunately her
"Memoires de la Cour de France" is fragmentary, as her son carelessly
lent the manuscripts, and many of them were lost. But the part that
remains gives ample evidence of the breadth of her intelligence, the
penetrating, lucid quality of her mind, and her talent for seizing the
salient traits of the life about her. In her romances, which were first
published under the name of Segrais, one finds the touch of an artist,
and the subtle intuitions of a woman. In the rapid evolution of modern
taste and the hopeless piling up of books, these works have fallen
somewhat into the shade, but they are written with a vivid naturalness
of style, a truth of portraiture, and a delicacy of sentiment, that
commend them still to all lovers of imaginative literature. Fontenelle
read the "Princesse de Cleves" four ti