I send you M. de Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," revised and corrected, with additions; it is a present to you from himself. Some of them I can make shift to guess the meaning of; but there are others, that, to my shame be it spoken, I cannot understand at all. God knows how it will be with you. What was it changed this woman's mood to serious? She could not have been hearing Massillon's celebrated sermon on the "Fewness of the Elect," for Massillon was yet only a boy of nine years; she may have been reading Pascal's "Thoughts"--Pascal had been dead ten years, and the "Thoughts" had been published; or she may have been listening to one of those sifting, heart-searching discourses of Bourdaloue--the date of her letter is March 16, 1672, and during the Lent of that year Bourdaloue preached at Versailles--when she wrote somberly as follows: You ask me if I am as fond of life as ever. I must own to you that I experience mortifications, and severe ones too; but I am still unhappy at the thoughts of death; I consider it so great a misfortune to see the termination of all my pursuits, that I should desire nothing better, if it were practicable, than to begin life again. I find myself engaged in a scene of confusion and trouble; I was embarked in life without my own consent, and know I must leave it again; this distracts me, for how shall I leave it? In what manner? By what door? At what time? In what disposition? Am I to suffer a thousand pains and torments that will make me die in a state of despair? Shall I lose my senses? Am I to die by some sudden accident? How shall I stand with God? What shall I have to offer to him? Will fear and necessity make my peace with him? Shall I have no other sentiment but that of fear? What have I to hope? Am I worthy of heaven? Or have I deserved the torments of hell? Dreadful alternative! Alarming uncertainty! Can there be greater madness than to place our eternal salvation in uncertainty? Yet what is more natural, or can be more easily accounted for, than the foolish manner in which I have spent my life? I am frequently buried in thoughts of this nature, and then death appears so dreadful to me that I hate life more for leading me to it, than I do for all the thorns that are strewed in its way. You will ask me, then, if I would wish to live forever? Far from it; but if I had been consulted, I would very gladly have died in my nurse's arms; it would have spared me many vexations, and would have insured heaven to me at a very easy rate; but let us talk of something else. A memorable sarcasm saved for us by Madame de Sevigne, at the very close of one of her letters: Guilleragues said yesterday that Pelisson abused the privilege men have of being ugly. Readers familiar with Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities" will recognize in the following narrative a state of society not unlike that described by the novelist as immediately preceding the French Revolution: