prince,” she said of the Elector of another branch which was reigning in 1718, “because he loves the Palatinate. I can easily imagine how pained he was when he saw how little remained in the ruins of Heidelberg; the tears come into my eyes when I think of it, and I am so sad.” Nevertheless, she regrets the religious bickerings and persecutions introduced into the country, and her own powerlessness to intervene for the protection of those who are persecuted. “I see but too plainly now,” she writes in 1719, “that God did not will that I should accomplish any good in France, for, in spite of my efforts, I have never been able to be useful to my native country. It is true that when I came to France it was purely in obedience to my father, my uncle, and my aunt, the Electress of Hanover; my inclination did in nowise bring me here.” Thus, in the marriage, apparently so brilliant, which she contracted with the brother of Louis XIV. Madame cared for one thing only, namely, to serve and protect her German land from French policy; and on that very side where politics (to which she was always a stranger) touched her most, she had the grief of failing.

When the marriage of Élisabeth-Charlotte was negotiated, it became a question of converting her. The erudite and witty Chévreau, who was at the Court of the Elector Palatine in the capacity of councillor, flattered himself that he contributed to that result by daily interviews with her of four hours in length for three weeks. One of the orators who eulogized Madame at the time of her death, her almoner (the Abbé de Saint-Géri de Magnas), said as to this: “When asked in marriage for Monsieur by Louis XIV. the principal condition was that she should embrace the Catholic religion. Neither ambition nor levity had any share in this change; the respect and tenderness she felt for Mme. la Princesse Palatine, her aunt, who was Catholic, prevented her from refusing to be instructed. She listened to Père Jourdain, a Jesuit. Born with the rectitude which distinguished her all her life, she did not resist the truth. Her abjuration was made at Metz.”

Madame was, in truth, perfectly sincere in her conversion; nevertheless, she carried into it something of her freedom of mind and her independence of temper. “On my arrival in France,” she says, “they made me hold conferences about religion with three bishops. All three differed in their beliefs; I took the quintessence of their opinions and formed my own.” In this catholic religion, thus defined in the rough, which she believed and practised in perfect good faith, there remained traces and several of the habits of her early faith. She continued to read the Bible in German. She mentions that at that period in France scarcely any one, even among the devout, read Holy Scripture. The translations recently made of it had led to such discussions and bitter quarrels that the ecclesiastical authority intervened and forbade the reading of them; which has ever since remained a rarity in our country. Madame was therefore a notable exception when, in her plan of life, she gave a great and regular place to meditation on the Holy Book. She selected three days in the week for that salutary practice. “After my son’s visit,” she writes (November, 1717), “I sat down to table, and after dinner I took my Bible and read four chapters of the book of Job, four Psalms, and two chapters of Saint John, leaving the other two till this morning.” And she might have written the same thing on each of her appointed days. On one occasion she was singing unconsciously the Calvinist psalms, or the Lutheran canticles (for she mixed them up), while walking alone in the Orangery at Versailles, when a painter who was at work on a scaffolding came down hurriedly and threw himself at her feet, saying with gratitude: “Is it possible, Madame, that you still remember our Psalms?” The painter was a reformer and afterwards a refugee; she relates the little story very touchingly.

She had nothing of the sectarian spirit. She blamed Luther for wishing to make a separate Church; he ought to have confined himself, she thought, to attacking abuses. She retained from him and from other reformers, in spite of her conversion, a habit of invective against religious Orders of all kinds; and on this subject she bursts into tirades which are less those of a woman than of a pedant of the sixteenth century or some doctor emancipated from the rue Saint-Jacques. Gui Patin in a farthingale could not have expressed himself differently. She corresponded with Leibnitz, who assured her that she wrote German “not badly;” which pleased her much, for she could not endure, she says, to see Germans despising and ignoring their mother tongue. The letters that she wrote to Leibnitz would be precious could they some day be recovered and published. She may have gladly borrowed from that illustrious philosopher his idea of an approach and fusion, a reconciliation, in short, between the principal Christian communities, for she renders it, rather brusquely as her manner was, when she says: “If they followed my advice all the sovereigns would give orders that among all Christians, without distinction of beliefs, people were to abstain from insulting expressions, and that each and all were to believe and practise as they saw fit.” In the midst of that Court of Louis XIV., which was so unanimous as to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, she retained the most inviolable ideas of tolerance. “It is not showing themselves in any way Christian,” she said, “to torture people for religious reasons, and I think it monstrous; but when one examines things to the bottom we find that religion is only a pretext; all is done from policy and selfish interests. They are serving Mammon, and not God.”

Later, she humanely intercedes with her son, the regent, to release from the galleys the Reformers who had been sent there. But as it is in Madame’s temperament to exaggerate everything, even her own good qualities, and to introduce a sort of incoherence into her efforts, she goes far beyond her object when she expresses the wish that she may see in the galleys, in the place of such poor innocents, those who she thinks have persecuted them, and also other monks, especially the Spanish monks, who resisted to the last in Barcelona the accession of Louis XIV.’s grandson. “They preached in all the streets that no one should surrender; and if I had my way those rascals would have gone to the galleys in place of the poor Reformers who are languishing there.” That is Madame—in all her goodness of heart, extravagance of language, and her frank, sincere religion of a mixed nature.

When she arrived in France at the age of nineteen no one expected all this. The Court was filled with memories and regrets for the late Madame, the amiable Henrietta, snatched away in the bloom of her charm and grace. “Alas!” cries Mme. de Sévigné, speaking of the new-comer, “alas! if this Madame could only represent to us her whom we have lost!” In place of a blithesome fairy and a being of enchantment, what was it that suddenly appeared before them?

“Madame,” says Saint-Simon, “was a princess of the olden time; attached to honour, virtue, rank, grandeur, and inexorable as to their observances. She was not without intellect; and what she saw she saw very well. A good and faithful friend, trusty, true, and upright; easy to prejudice and shock; very difficult to bring back from prejudice; coarse, and dangerous in her public outbursts; very German in her habits; frank, indifferent to all propriety and all delicacy for herself and for others; sober, solitary, and full of notions. She loved dogs and horses, hunting and theatres passionately, and was never seen except