re is something wanting; even in the affection of her friends.
"Ma grand'maman," she says to the gentle Duchesse de Choiseul, "you KNOW
that you love me, but you do not FEEL it."

Devouring herself in solitude, she despises the society she cannot do
without. "Men and women appear to me puppets who go, come, talk, laugh,
without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling," she writes.
She confesses that she has a thousand troubles in assembling a choice
company of people who bore her to death. "One sees only masks, one hears
only lies," is her constant refrain. She does not want to live, but is
afraid to die; she says she is not made for this world, but does not
know that there is any other. She tries devotion, but has no taste for
it. Of the light that shines from within upon so many darkened and weary
souls she has no knowledge. Her vision is bounded by the tangible, which
offers only a rigid barrier, against which her life flutters itself
away. She dies as she has lived, with a deepened conviction of the
nothingness of existence. "Spare me three things," she said to her
confessor in her last moments; "let me have no questions, no reasons,
and no sermons." Seeing Wiart, her faithful servitor, in tears, she
remarks pathetically, as if surprised, "You love me then?" "Divert
yourself as much as you can," was her final message to Walpole. "You
will regret me, because one is very glad to know that one is loved." She
commends to his care and affection Tonton, her little dog.

Strong but not gentle, brilliant but not tender, too penetrating for any
illusions, with a nature forever at war with itself, its surroundings,
and its limitations, no one better points the moral of an age without
faith, without ideals, without the inner light that reveals to hope what
is denied to sense.

The influence of such a woman with her gifts, her energy, her power,
and her social prestige, can hardly be estimated. It was not in the
direction of the new drift of thought. "I am not a fanatic as to
liberty," she said; "I believe it is an error to pretend that it exists
in a democracy. One has a thousand tyrants in place of one." She had
no breadth of sympathy, and her interests were largely personal; but
in matters of style and form her taste was unerring. Pitiless in her
criticisms, she held firmly to her ideals of clear, elegant, and concise
expression, both in literature and in conversation. She tolerated
no latitudes, no pretension, and l