: "I can only say that it is very
difficult to keep, and for a cat religiously brought up it is very
little inclined to seclusion. It never sees a window without wishing to
jump out, it would have leaped over the wall twenty times if it had
not been prevented, and no secular cat could be more lawless or more
self-willed."

The wit here is certainly rather attenuated, but the subject is an
ungrateful one. Mme. de Sevigne finds Voiture "libre, badin, charmant,"
and disposes of his critics by saying, "So much the worse for those
who do not understand him." One is often puzzled to detect this rare
spirituelle quality; but it is fair to presume that it was of the
volatile sort that evaporates with time.

All this sentimental masquerading and exaggerated gallantry suggests
the vulnerable side of the Hotel de Rambouillet, and the side which its
enemies have been disposed to make very prominent. Among those who tried
to imitate this salon, Spanish chivalry doubtless degenerated into a
thousand absurdities, and it must be admitted that the salon itself was
not free from reproach on this point. It became the fashion to write
and talk in the language of hyperbole. Sighing lovers were consumed with
artificial fires, and ready to die with affected languors. Like the
old poets of Provence, whose spirit they caught and whose phrases they
repeated, they were dying of love they did not feel. The eyes of Phyllis
extinguished the sun. The very nightingales expired of jealousy, after
hearing the voice of Angelique.

It would be difficult, perhaps, to find anywhere a company of clever
people bent upon amusing themselves and passing every day more or less
together, whose sayings and doings would bear to be exactly chronicled.
The literary diversions and poetic ideals of this circle, too, gave a
certain color to the charge of affectation, among people of less refined
instincts, who found its esprit incomprehensible, its manners prudish,
and its virtue a tacit reproach; but the dignified and serious character
of many of its constant habitues should be a sufficient guarantee that
it did not greatly pass the limits of good taste and good sense. The
only point upon which Mme. de Rambouillet seems to have been open to
criticism was a certain formal reserve and an over-fastidious delicacy;
but in an age when the standards of both refinement and morals were so
low, this implies a virtue rather than a defect. Nor does her character
appear to have