some exquisite lines to this book. "It is touching to think," he
writes, "of the peculiar situation which gave birth to these
beings so charming, so pure, these characters so noble and so
spotless, these sentiments so fresh, so faultless, so tender; how
Mme. de La Fayette put into it all that her loving, poetic soul
retained of its first, ever-cherished dreams, and how M. de La
Rochefoucauld was pleased doubtless to find once more in "M. De
Nemours" that brilliant flower of chivalry which he had too much
misused--a sort of flattering mirror in which he lived again his
youth. Thus these two old friends renewed in imagination the
pristine beauty of that age when they had not known each other,
hence could not love each other. The blush so characteristic of
Mme. De Cleves, and which at first is almost her only language,
indicates well the design of the author, which is to paint love
in its freshest, purest, vaguest, most adorable, most disturbing,
most irresistible--in a word, in its own color. It is
constantly a question of that joy which youth joined to beauty
gives, of the trouble and embarrassment that love causes in the
innocence of early years, in short, of all that is farthest from
herself and her friend in their late tie."

But whatever tints her tender and delicate imaginings may have
taken from her own soul, Mme. de La Fayette has caught the
eternal beauty of a pure and loyal spirit rising above the mists
of sense into the serene air of a lofty Christian renunciation.

The sad but triumphant close of her romance foreshadowed the
swift breaking up of her own pleasant life. In 1680, not long
after the appearance of the "Princesse de Cleves," La Rochefoucauld
died, and the song of her heart was changed to a miserere. Mme.