forced in colour, rather coarse in feature, exaggerated and grimacing at times, but on the whole good likenesses. The right method for judging of Madame’s correspondence, and thus of gaining insight to the history of that period, is to see how Madame wrote, and in what spirit; also what she herself was by nature and by education. For this purpose the letters published by M. Menzel in German, and translated by M. Brunet, are of great assistance to a knowledge of this singular and original personage; to understand her properly it is not too much to say that Germany and France must be combined.

Élisabeth-Charlotte, who married in 1671 Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV., was born at Heidelberg in 1652. Her father, Charles-Louis, was that Elector of the Palatinate who was restored to his States by the Peace of Westphalia. From childhood Élisabeth-Charlotte was noted for her lively mind, and her frank, open, vigorous nature. Domestic peace had never reigned about the hearth of the Elector-Palatine; he had a mistress, whom he married by the left hand, and the mother of Élisabeth-Charlotte is accused of having caused the separation by her crabbed temper. The young girl was confided to the care of her aunt Sophia, Electress of Hanover, a person of merit, for whom she always retained the feelings and gratitude of a loving daughter. To her she addressed her longest and most confidential letters, which would certainly surpass in interest those that are published, but M. Menzel states that it is not known what became of them. All that part of the life and youth of Madame would be curious and very useful to recover. “I was too old,” she says, “when I came to France to change my character; the foundations were laid.” While subjecting herself with courage and resolution to the duties of her new position she kept her German tastes; she confesses them and proclaims them before all Versailles and all Marly; and the Court, then the arbiter of Europe, to which it set the tone, would certainly have been shocked if it had not preferred to smile.

From Marly after forty-three years’ residence in France, Madame writes (November 22, 1714): “I cannot endure coffee, chocolate, or tea, and I do not understand how any one can like them; a good dish of sauerkraut and smoked sausages is, to my mind, a feast for a king, to which nothing is preferable; cabbage soup with lard suits me much better than all the delicacies they dote on here.” In the commonest and most every-day things she finds another and a poorer taste than in Germany. “The butter and milk,” she says, after fifty years’ residence, “are not as good as ours; they have no flavour and taste like water. The cabbages are not good either, for the soil is not rich, but light and sandy, so that vegetables have no strength and the cows cannot give good milk. Mon Dieu! how I should like to eat the dishes your cook prepares for you; they would be more to my taste than those my maître-d’hôtel serves up to me.”

But she clung to her own country, her German stock, her “Rhin allemand,” by other memories than those of food and the national cooking. She loved nature, the country, a free life, even a wild one; the impressions of her childhood returned to her in whiffs of freshness. Apropos of Heidelberg, rebuilt after the disasters, and of a convent of Jesuits, or Franciscans, established on the heights, “Mon Dieu!” she cries, “how many times I have eaten cherries on that mountain, with a good bit of bread, at five in the morning! I was gayer then than I am to-day.” The brisk air of Heidelberg is with her after fifty years’ absence; and she speaks of it a few months before her death to the half-sister Louise, to whom she writes: “There is not in all the world a better air than that of Heidelberg; above all, about the château where my apartment is; nothing better can be found.”

In Germany, on the banks of the Neckar and the Rhine, Élisabeth-Charlotte enjoyed the picturesque sites, her rambles through the forests, Nature left to herself, and also the spots of bourgeois plenty amid the wilder environment. “I love trees and fields more than the finest palaces; I like a kitchen garden better than a garden with statues and fountains; a brook pleases me a great deal more than sumptuous cascades; in a word, all that is natural is infinitely more to my taste than works of art or magnificence; the latter only please at first sight; as soon as one is accustomed to them they fatigue, and we care no more about them.” In France she was particularly fond of residing at Saint-Cloud, where she enjoyed Nature with greater liberty. At Fontainebleau she often walked out on foot and went a league through the forest. On her arrival in France and first appearance at Court, she told her physician when presented to her that “she did not need him; she had never been bled or purged, and when she did not feel well she always walked six miles on foot, which cured her.” Mme. de Sévigné who relates this, seems to conclude, with the majority of the Court, that the new Madame was overcome with her grandeur and spoke like a person who is not accustomed to such surroundings. Mme. de Sévigné is mistaken; Madame was in no degree overcome by her greatness. She felt herself born for the high rank of Monsieur’s wife, and would have felt in her right place if higher still. But Mme. de Sévigné though she herself walked with pleasure in her woods at Livry and her park des Rochers, did not divine the proud young girl, so brusque and wild, who ate with delight her bit of bread and cherries plucked from the trees at five in the morning on the hills of Heidelberg.

Madame’s marriage was not made to please her. In France this has been concealed; in Germany it was said quite plainly. Her father, the Elector, hoped by this alliance to buy the safety of his dominions, always threatened by the French. Like a pious daughter she obeyed; but she could not refrain from saying: “I am the political lamb, about to be sacrificed for my country.” The lamb, after we once know her, seems a singular term to choose for so vigorous a victim; but the comparison is just, all the same, so tender and good was the heart within her.

The rôle that Madame conceived for herself in France was that of preserving her native country from the horrors of war, and of being useful to it in the different schemes which agitated the Court of France and might in the end overthrow it. In this she failed; and the failure was to her a poignant grief. She was even made the innocent cause of fresh disasters to the land she loved when, on the death of her father and her brother (who left no children), Louis XIV. set up a claim to the Palatinate on her account. Instead of bringing pledges and guarantees of peace, she found herself a pretext and a means for war. The devastation and the too famous incendiarism of the Palatinate which the struggles of ambition brought about caused her inexpressible grief. “When I think of those flames, shudders run over me. Every time I try to go to sleep I see Heidelberg on fire, and I start up in bed, so that I am almost ill in consequence.” She speaks of this incessantly, and bleeds and weeps for it after many years. For Louvois she retained an eternal hatred. “I suffer bitter pain,” she writes thirty years later (November 3, 1718), “when I think of all that M. de Louvois burned up in the Palatinate; I believe he is burning terribly in the other world, for he died so suddenly he had no time to repent.”

Madame’s virtue in this and other conjunctures was in being faithful to France and to Louis XIV., all the while torn by distress within her secret self. She never ceases to interest herself in the fate of her unhappy country, and in its resurrection after so many disasters. “I love that