her, with haunting memories of the Bastille, recall the innocence
of her own early convent days? Did she remember some long-buried
love, and the child left to perish upon the steps of St. Jean le
Rond, but grown up to be her secret pride in the person of the
great mathematician and philosopher d'Alembert? What was the
subtle link between this worldly woman and the eternal passion,
the tender self-sacrifice of Adelaide, the loyal heroine who
breathes out her solitary and devoted soul on the ashes of La
Trappe, unknown to her faithful and monastic lover, until the
last sigh? The fate of Adelaide has become a legend. It has
furnished a theme for the poet and the artist, an inspiration for
the divine strains of Beethoven, another leaf in the annals of
pure and heroic love. But the woman who conceived it toyed with
the human heart as with a beautiful flower, to be tossed aside
when its first fragrance was gone. She apparently knew neither
the virtue, nor the honor, nor the purity, nor the truth of which
she had so exquisite a perception in the realm of the
imagination. Or were some of the episodes which darken the story
of her life simply the myths of a gossiping age, born of the
incidents of an idle tale, to live forever on the pages of
history?

But it was not as a literary woman that Mme. de Tencin held her
position and won her fame. Her gifts were eminently those of her
age and race, and it may be of interest to compare her with a
woman of larger talent of a purely intellectual order, who
belonged more or less to the world of the salons, without
aspiring to leadership, and who, though much younger, died in the
same year. Mme. du Chatelet was essentially a woman of letters.
She loved the exact sciences, expounded Leibnitz, translated