Bossuet. Leave it there!
Fontanges. Your ring fell from your hand, my Lord Bishop! How quick you are! Could not you have trusted me to pick it up?
Bossuet. Madame is too condescending: had this happened, I should have been overwhelmed with confusion. My hand is shrivelled: the ring has ceased to fit it. A mere accident may draw us into perdition; a mere accident may bestow on us the means of grace. A pebble has moved you more than my words.
Fontanges. It pleases me vastly: I admire rubies. I will ask the King for one exactly like it. This is the time he usually comes from the chase. I am sorry you cannot be present to hear how prettily I shall ask him: but that is impossible, you know; for I shall do it just when I am certain he would give me anything. He said so himself; he said but yesterday—
'Such a sweet creature is worth a world":
and no actor on the stage was more like a king than His Majesty was when he spoke it, if he had but kept his wig and robe on. And yet you know he is rather stiff and wrinkled for so great a monarch; and his eyes, I am afraid, are beginning to fail him, he looks so close at things.
Bossuet. Mademoiselle, such is the duty of a prince who desires to conciliate our regard and love.
Fontanges. Well, I think so too, though I did not like it in him at first. I am sure he will order the ring for me, and I will confess to you with it upon my finger. But first I must be cautious and particular to know of him how much it is his royal will that I should say.
[231] Bossuet was in his fifty-fourth year; Mademoiselle de Fontanges died in child-bed the year following; he survived her twenty-three years.
[232] Though Bossuet was capable of uttering and even of feeling such a sentiment, his conduct towards Fénélon, the fairest apparition that Christianity ever presented, was ungenerous and unjust.
While the diocese of Cambray was ravaged by Louis, it was spared by Marlborough, who said to the Archbishop that, if he was sorry he had not taken Cambray, it was chiefly because he lost for a time the pleasure of visiting so great a man. Peterborough, the next of our generals in glory, paid his respects to him some years afterward.