unsealing the letters, would find her opinion of them. “In the days of M. de Louvois,” she writes, “they read all letters just as they do now, but at least they sent them on in decent time; but now that that toad of a Torcy directs the post-office, letters are delayed for an interminable length of time.... As Torcy does not know how to read German he has to have them translated, and I don’t thank him for his attention.” M. de Torcy must have enjoyed that passage.

Among the tastes, or fancies, which together with her letter-writing served to fill and amuse the long hours of Madame’s solitude, we must reckon two parrots, a canary, and eight little dogs. “After my dinner I walk my room for half an hour for the sake of digestion, and play with my little animals.” A nobler taste was that of coins, which Madame had to a high degree. She collected them from all parts of the world, and no one could pay their court more delicately than by bringing her a specimen. The collection that she thus formed was celebrated. She confided the care of it to the learned Baudelot, who had all the erudition and naïveté of an antiquary, and with whom she sometimes amused herself. “One study alone,” says one of her eulogists, “attracted her—that of coins. Her series of the emperors of the upper and lower empire, which she collected with judgment and arranged with care, placed before her eyes all that was most to be respected in past ages. While examining the features on the coins she recalled the salient points of their owners’ actions, filling her mind with noble ideas of Roman greatness.” I do not know whether in forming her cabinet of coins Madame had any such lofty and stern views, but at any rate, in this most remarkable of her tastes she showed herself the mother of the regent,—that is to say, of the most brilliant and best-informed of amateurs.

There is a serious side in the letters of Madame: that by which she judges the morals, the personages, and the society of the regency. She had some trouble in breaking herself in to that new style of life, and to a residence in the city and the Palais-Royal. “I like the Parisians,” she writes, “but I do not like to live in their town.” She had accustomed herself, during her long seasons at Saint-Cloud, to a measure of retreat, companionship, and liberty which suited her nature, and I shall even say, her semi-philosophy. When she returned there she felt herself in her element. “I find myself well at Saint-Cloud, where I am tranquil (1718); whereas in Paris I am never left an instant in peace. This one presents me a petition, that one asks me to interest myself on his behalf, another solicits an audience, and so forth. In this world great people have their worries like little ones, which is not surprising; but what makes it worse for the great is that they are always surrounded by a crowd, so that they can not hide their griefs, or indulge them in solitude—they are always on exhibition.”

That regret was in her a most sincere one. The power of her son brought her little influence, and she wanted none, save for the sake of a few private benefits. She asked him for nothing; she never meddled in public affairs or politics, and piqued herself on not understanding them. “I have no ambition,” she said (August, 1719); “I do not wish to govern; I should take no pleasure in it. It is not so with French women; the lowest servant-woman thinks herself quite fitted to rule the State. I think it so ridiculous that I am quite cured of all mania of that kind.”

She views like a virtuous woman the debauchery of the period, and that of her family, and she expresses the deep disgust she feels for it. The regent has never been better painted than he is by his mother; she shows him to us with his facile faculties, his interests of all kinds, his talents, his individual genius, his graces, his indulgence for all, even for his enemies; she denounces the one great capital fault that ruined him,—that ardent debauchery at a fixed hour, in which he buried himself and was lost to sight until the next morning. “All advice, all remonstrance on that subject,” she writes, “are useless; when spoken to he answers, ‘From six o’clock in the morning till night I am subjected to prolonged and fatiguing labour; if I did not amuse myself after that I could not bear it, I should die of melancholy.’ I pray God sincerely for his conversion,” she adds, “he has no other fault than that, but that is great.” She shows him to us as a libertine even in matters of science, that is, curious and amorous of all he saw, but disgusted with all he possessed. “Though he talks of learned things, I see plainly that instead of giving him pleasure they bore him. I have often scolded him for this; he answers it is not his fault; that he does take pleasure in learning all things, but as soon as he knows them he has no further pleasure in them.”

The most characteristic passages in her letters are of things that cannot be detached and cited singly. Never did the effrontery and gluttony of women of all ranks, the cupidity of everybody, the shameless traffic and cynical thirst for gold, find a firmer or more vigorous hand to catch them in the act and blast them. Madame, in treating of these excesses, has a species of virtuous immodesty like that of Juvenal; or rather, issuing from her Bible readings, she applies to present scandals the energy of the sacred text, and qualifies them in the language of the patriarchs. “How many times,” says one of her eulogists whom I like to quote, “how many times she condemned the bold negligence of attire which favoured corruption, and the taste for liberty and caprice—the fatal charm which our nation has criminally invented! Indecent fashions, which ancient decorum cannot away with, would often bring upon her face and in her eyes the emotion and fire of outraged modesty.” It was not a mere sentiment of etiquette which made her rebuke her grand-daughter, the Duchesse de Berry, on her dishabille, but another and a more estimable sentiment. Even where she is not outraged she gives details which make her smile with pity. “It is only too true that the women paint themselves blue veins to make believe their skins are so delicate the veins show through them.”

The Duc de Richelieu, a young dandy who turned all the heads of the day, and whom our writers, at their wits’ end, have lately endeavoured to restore to fashion in novels and plays, was to Madame an object of extreme aversion; she paints him with the hand of a master, as absolutely contemptible, with all his equivocal and frivolous charms, his varnish of politeness, and his vices. It is a portrait to read, and I should like to quote it here, but I am restrained by respect for the great men, and for the honourable men, who have made that name of Richelieu so French. Without going beyond general observations what can be more just and more sensible than the following reflection of Madame, written a few months before her death (April, 1722)? “Young men, at the epoch in which we live, have but two objects in view,—debauchery and lucre; the absorption of their minds on money-getting, no matter by what means, makes them dull and disagreeable; in order to be agreeable, people must have their minds free of care, and also have the wish to give themselves up to amusement in decent company; but these are things that are very far away from us now-a-days.” With a presentiment of her coming end, she asks of God only his mercy to herself and her children, especially her son. “May it please God to convert him! that is the sole favour that I ask of Him. I do not believe that there are in Paris, either among ecclesiastics or people of the world, one hundred persons who have a true Christian