"and you are as delicious as your letters." Her own were as much
sought in her time, but she had no profound affection to
consecrate them and no children to collect them, so that only a
few have been preserved. There is a curious vein of philosophy
in one she wrote to her husband, when the pleasures of life began
to fade. "As for myself, I care little for the world; I find it
no longer suited to my age; I have no engagements, thank God, to
retain me there. I have seen all there is to see. I have only
an old face to present to it, nothing new to show nor to discover
there. Ah! What avails it to recommence every day the visits,
to trouble one's self always about things that do not concern us?
. . . . My dear sir, we must think of something more solid."
She disappears from the scene shortly after the death of Mme. De
Sevigne. Long years of silence and seclusion, and another
generation heard one day that she had lived and that she was
dead.

The friends of Mme. de Sevigne slip away one after another; La
Rochefoucauld, De Retz, Mme. de La Fayette are gone. "Alas!" she
writes, "how this death goes running about and striking on all
sides." The thought troubles her. "I am embarked in life without
my consent," she says; "I must go out of it--that overwhelms me.
And how shall I go? Whence: By what door? When will it be? In
what disposition: How shall I be with God? What have I to
present to him? What can I hope?--Am I worthy of paradise? Am
I worthy of hell? What an alternative! What a complication! I
would like better to have died in the arms of my nurse."

The end came to her in the one spot where she would most have
wished it. She died while on a visit to her daughter in