She laughed as she seated herself—a gay, frank, hearty little laugh—and she spread out her hands with the opening of her fan, as, with her usual vivacious spontaneity, her mood changed.
"Fancy, dear duchesse, the punishment that comes to one who commits the crime of looking young—younger than one ought! My son-in-law, M. de Grignan, actually avows he is in daily terror lest I should give him a father-in-law!"
All three ladies laughed gayly at this absurdity; the subject of Madame de Sévigné's remarrying had come to be a venerable joke now. It had been talked of at court and in society for nearly forty years; but such was the conquering power of her charms that these two friends, her listeners, saw nothing really extravagant in her son-in-law's fear; she was one of those rare women who, even at sixty, continue to suggest the altar rather than the grave. Madame de Kerman was the first to recover her breath after the laughter.
"Dear friend, you might assure him that after a youth and the golden meridian of your years passed in smiling indifference to the sighs of a Prince de Conti, of a Turenne, of a Fouquet, of a Bussy de Rabutin, at sixty it is scarcely likely that—"
"Ah, dear lady at sixty, when one has the complexion and the curls, to say nothing of the eyes of our dear enchantress, a woman is as dangerous as at thirty!" The duchesse's flattery was charmingly put, with just enough vivacity of tone to save it from the charge of insipidity. Madame de Sévigné bowed her curls to her waist.
"Ah, dear duchesse, it isn't age," she retorted, quickly, "that could make me commit follies. It is the fact that that son-in-law of mine actually surrounds me with spies—he keeps me in perpetual surveillance. Such a state of captivity is capable of making me forget everything; I am beginning to develop a positive rage for follies. You know that has been my chief fault—always; discretion has been left out of my composition. But I say now, as I have always said, that if I could manage to live two hundred years, I should become the most delightful person in the world!"
She herself was the first to lead in the laughter that followed her outburst; and then the duchesse broke in:
"You talk of defects, dear friend; but reflect what a life yours has been. So surrounded and courted, and yet you were always so guarded; so free, and yet so wise! So gay, and yet so chaste!"
"If you rubbed out all those flattering colors, dear duchesse, and wrote only, 'She worshipped her children, and preferred friends to lovers,' the portrait would be far nearer to the truth. It is easy to be chaste if one has only known one passion in one's life, and that the maternal one!"
Again a change passed over Madame de Sévigné's mobile face; the bantering tone was lost in a note of deep feeling. This gift of sensibility had always been accounted as one of Madame de Sévigné's chief charms; and now, at sixty, she was as completely the victim of her moods as in her earlier youth.