to keep herself in the background, while giving us a faithful picture of
the brilliant Court at which she was for long the most lustrous ornament.
It is only by stray touches, a casual remark, a chance phrase, that we,
as it were, gauge her temperament in all its wiliness, its egoism, its
love of supremacy, and its shallow worldly wisdom. Yet it could have
been no ordinary woman that held the handsome Louis so long her captive.
The fair Marquise was more than a mere leader of wit and fashion. If she
set the mode in the shape of a petticoat, or devised the sumptuous
splendours of a garden fete, her talent was not merely devoted to things
frivolous and trivial. She had the proverbial 'esprit des Mortemart'.
Armed with beauty and sarcasm, she won a leading place for herself at
Court, and held it in the teeth of all detractors.

Her beauty was for the King, her sarcasm for his courtiers. Perhaps
little of this latter quality appears in the pages bequeathed to us,
written, as they are, in a somewhat cold, formal style, and we may assume
that her much-dreaded irony resided in her tongue rather than in her pen.
Yet we are glad to possess these pages, if only as a reliable record of
Court life during the brightest period of the reign of Louis Quatorze.

As we have hinted, they are more, indeed, than this. For if we look
closer we shall perceive, as in a glass, darkly, the contour of a subtle,
even a perplexing, personality.

P. E. P.