weakness and instability in many of his mother's intimate
letters. In the end, however, having exhausted the pleasures of
life and felt the bitterness of its disappointments, he took
refuge in devotion, and died in the odor of sanctity, after the
example of his devout ancestress.

Mme. de Grignan certainly offered a more solid foundation for her
mother's confidence and affection. It is quite possible, too,
that her reserve concealed graces of character only apparent on a
close intimacy. But love does not wait for reasons, and this
one had all the shades and intensities of a passion, with few of
its exactions. D'Andilly called the mother a "pretty pagan,"
because she made such an idol of her daughter. She sometimes has
her own misgivings on the score of religion. "I make this a
little Trappe," she wrote from Livry, after the separation. "I
wish to pray to God and make a thousand reflections; but, Ma
pauvre chere, what I do better than all that is to think of you.
. . I see you, you are present to me, I think and think again of
everything; my head and my mind are racked; but I turn in vain, I
seek in vain; the dear child whom I love with so much passion is
two hundred leagues away. I have her no more. Then I weep
without the power to help myself." She rings the changes upon
this inexhaustible theme. A responsive word delights her; a
brief silence terrifies her; a slight coldness plunges her into
despair. "I have an imagination so lively that uncertainty makes
me die," she writes. If a shadow of grief touches her idol, her
sympathies are overflowing. "You weep, my very dear child; it is
an affair for you; it is not the same thing for me, it is my
temperament."