But what was this Blue Room, this mysterious and azure grot in which the genius of French classic poetry went through its transformation? There was not much mystery about it. It was a room, deep in the magnificence of the Hôtel, where the Marquise was in the habit of receiving the familiar visits of her best friends. The novelty of it was its colour; all other _salons_ in Paris being at that time painted red or drab. Out of the Blue Room there opened a more secret retreat, her _cabinet_ or _alcove_, where she could withdraw from all companionship, and spend her time in reading or meditating. The furniture of the whole Hôtel de Rambouillet was on a scale of opulent splendour, but the rarity of the objects brought together was concentrated in the _cabinet_, which was, as M. Magne puts it, a sort of altar which the Marquise raised to herself. Every object in it was fragile, brilliant, and precious. In the days when Malherbe frequented the Hôtel, it is probable that no inner room existed. Tallemant gives us the very odd history of what led to its formation. The Marquise in her youth was active and ready to expose herself to the weather, but about 1623 she began to be threatened by an _incommodité_, which made her unable to bear exposure to heat. She had been in the habit of taking long walks in Paris, but one summer's day, when the sun suddenly came out while she was strolling at La Cour-la-Reine, on the Champs Elysées, she nearly fainted, and was threatened with erysipelas. The following winter, the first time that she drew up her chair to read by the fire, the same phenomenon came on. She was now divided between perishing with cold or suffering miseries of heat, and she therefore invented, taking the idea from the Spanish "alcove," a little supplementary room, where she could sit close to her friends, while they gathered round the hearth, and yet not be smitten by the flames. In 1656, in the great winter, we hear of her, now an elderly woman, lying on her bed, heaped over with furs, but not daring to have a fire in sight.