unselfish devotion, and her final revolt against what seemed to
be an inexorable fate. The struggle between her self-forgetful
love for the knightly Chevalier d'Aydie and her sensitive
conscience, her refusal to cloud his future by a portionless
marriage, and her firmness in severing an unholy tie, knowing
that the sacrifice would cost her life, as it did, form an
episode as rare as it is tragical. But her exquisite
personality, her rich gifts of mind and soul, her fine
intelligence, her passionate love, almost consecrated by her
pious but fatal renunciation, call up one of the loveliest
visions of the century--a vision that lingers in the memory like
a medieval poem.

Mme. de Tencin amused her later years b writing sentimental
tales, which were found among her papers after her death. These
were classed with the romances of Mme. de La Fayette. Speaking
of the latter, La Harpe said, "Only one other woman succeeded, a
century later, in painting with equal power the struggles of love
and virtue." It is one of the curious inconsistencies of her
character, that her creations contained an element which her life
seems wholly to have lacked. Behind all her faults of conduct
there was clearly an ideal of purity and goodness. Her stories
are marked by a vividness and an ardor of passion rarely found in
the insipid and colorless romances of the preceding age. Her
pictures of love and intrigue and crime are touched with the
religious enthusiasm of the cloister, the poetry of devotion, the
heroism of self-sacrifice. Perhaps the dark and mysterious facts
of her own history shaped themselves in her imagination. Did the
tragedy of La Fresnaye, the despairing lover who blew out his
brains at her feet, leaving the shadow of a crime hanging over