"The bridge was broken and the coach could not cross it, so I was forced to go on foot. It was two o'clock in the morning. I entered an old house—my home—without doors or windows; and in the court the weeds were knee-high.... Fear, horror, and grief seized me, and I wept."

Let her weep. It was no more than she deserved to do as penalty for all the evil that she had brought about by the Fronde. Four years of a flagitious war, begun as the effort of conscientious patriots, under pressure of the general interest, then turned to a perambulating exhibition of selfish vanities and a hunt for écus which wrecked the peace and the prosperity of France!

In one single diocese (Laon) more than twenty curés were forced to desert their villages because they had neither parishioners nor means of living. Throughout the kingdom men had been made servile by physical and moral suffering and by the need of rest; borne down by the imperious demands of worn-out nature, they loathed action. The heroes of Corneille (of the ideal "superhuman" type of the heroes of Nietzsche) had had their day and the hour of the natural man—human, not superhuman—had come.

Five years later, when Mademoiselle returned to Paris, she found a new world, with manners in sharp contrast with her own. It was her fate to yield to the influence of the new ideal, when, forgetting that a certain degree of quality "lifts the soul above tenderness," she yielded up her soul to Lauzun in romantic love. Some day, not far distant, we shall meet her in her new sphere.

INDEX

FRENCH HISTORY.