dwindled to absurdity in the hands of Mlle. de Scudery and her valets, before Moliere smiled it away forever.  And now that the wars were done, literary society came up again.  Madame de Sable exhausted the wit and the cookery of the age in her fascinating entertainments,—­pates and Pascal, Rochefoucauld and ragouts,—­Mme. de Bregy’s Epictetus, Mme. de Choisy’s salads,—­confectionery, marmalade, elixirs, Des Cartes, Arnould, Calvinism, and the barometer.  Mme. de Sable had a sentimental theory that no woman should eat at the same table with a lover, but she liked to see her lovers eat, and Mademoiselle, in her obsolete novel of the “Princesse de Paphlagonie,” gently satirizes this passion of her friend.  And Mademoiselle herself finally eclipsed the Sable by her own entertainments at her palace of the Luxembourg, where she offered no dish but one of gossip, serving up herself and friends in a course of “Portraits” so appetizing that it became the fashion for ten years, and reached perfection at last in the famous “Characters” of La Bruyere.

Other heroines went into convents, joined the Carmelites, or those nuns of Port-Royal of whom the Archbishop of Paris said that they lived in the purity of angels and the pride of devils.  Thither went Madame de Sable herself, finally,—­“the late Madame,” as the dashing young abbes called her when she renounced the world.  Thither she drew the beautiful Longueville also, and Heaven smiled on one repentance that seemed sincere.  There they found peace in the home of Angelique Arnould and Jacqueline Pascal.  And thence those heroic women came forth again, when religious war threatened to take the place of civil:  again they put to shame their more timid male companions, and by their labors Jesuit and Jansenist found peace.

But not such was to be the career of our Mademoiselle, who, at twenty, had tried the part of devotee for one week and renounced it forever.  No doubt, at thirty-five, she “began to understand that it is part of the duty of a Christian to attend High Mass on Sundays and holy days”; and her description of the deathbed of Anne of Austria is a most extraordinary jumble of the next world and this.  But thus much of devotion was to her only a part of the proprieties of life, and before the altar of those proprieties she served, for the rest of her existence, with exemplary zeal.  At forty, she was still the wealthiest unmarried princess in Europe; fastidious in toilette, stainless in reputation, not lovely in temper, rigid in etiquette, learned in precedence, an oracle in court traditions, a terror to the young maids-of-honor, and always quarrelling with her own sisters, younger, fairer, poorer than herself.  Her mind and will were as active as in her girlhood, but they ground chaff instead of wheat.  Whether her sisters should dine at the Queen’s table, when she never had; who should be her trainbearer at the royal marriage; whether the royal Spanish father-in-law,