should be indebted to you all my life." Mme. de Longueville, who
is about to visit her, begs her not to give a feast as she has
"scruples about such indulgence."

This spice of worldliness very much tempered the austerity of her
retreat, and lent an added luster to its intellectual
attractions. But the Marquise had many conflicts between her
luxurious tastes and her desire to be devout. Her dainty and
epicurean habits, her extraordinary anxiety about her health, and
her capricious humors were the subject of much light badinage
among her friends. The Grande Mademoiselle sketches these traits
with a satiric touch in the "Princesse de Paphlagonie," where she
introduces her with the Comtesse de Maure. "There are no hours
when they do not confer together upon the means of preventing
themselves from dying, and upon the art of rendering themselves
immortal," she writes. "Their conferences are not like those of
other people; the fear of breathing an air too cold or too hot,
the apprehension that the wind may be too dry or too damp, a
fancy that the weather is not as moderate as they judge necessary
for the preservation of their health--these are sufficient
reasons for writing from one room to another . . . . If one
could find this correspondence, one might derive great advantages
in every way; for they were princesses who had nothing mortal,
except the knowledge of being so . . . Of Mme. de Sable she
adds: "The Princess Parthenie had a taste as dainty as her mind;
nothing equaled the magnificence of her entertainments; all the
viands were exquisite, and her elegance was beyond anything that
one could imagine." The fastidious Marquise suffered, with all
the world, from the defects of her qualities. Her extreme
delicacy and sensibility appear under many forms and verge often