interests than her own. She had been trained in a different
school from Mme. de Maintenon, her temperament was modified by
her frail health, and the prizes of life had come to her
apparently without special exertion. She was a woman, too, of
more sentiment and imagination. Her fastidious delicacy and
luxurious tastes were the subject of critical comment on the part
of this austere censor, who condemned the gilded decorations of
her bed as a useless extravagance, giving the characteristic
reason that "the pleasure they afforded was not worth the
ridicule they excited." The old friendship that had existed when
Mme. Scarron was living in such elegant and mysterious seclusion,
devoting herself to the king's children, and finding her main
diversion in the little suppers enlivened by the wit of Mme. de
Sevigne and Mme. de Coulanges, and the more serious, but not less
agreeable, conversation of Mme. de La Fayette, had evidently
grown cool. They had their trifling disagreements. "Mme. de La
Fayette puts too high a price upon her friendship," wrote Mme. de
Maintenon, who had once attached such value to a few approving
words from her. In her turn Mme. de La Fayette indulged in a
little light satire. Referring to the comedy of Esther, which
Racine had written by command for the pupils at Saint Cyr, she
said, "It represents the fall of Mme. de Montespan and the rise
of Mme. de Maintenon; all the difference is that Esther was
rather younger, and less of a precieuse in the matter of piety."
There was certainly less of the ascetic in Mme. de La Fayette.
She had more color and also more sincerity. In symmetry of
character, in a certain feminine quality of taste and tenderness,
she was superior, and she seems to me to have been of more
intrinsic value as a woman. Whether under the same conditions
she would have attained the same power may be a question. If