influence, it was rather from choice than from inability. Her early and tragic experience had taught her a real contempt for the fleeting glitter of Court life, and she never lost the spirit which, in her early convent days, led her, when one of her former friends reproached her for the change which had come over her, and hinted that she was mad, to reply gently: "No, I think I have left you the madness in leaving you the world." She had no truer mourner than the Queen of England, who hastened to associate herself with the sorrowing community. "One day you tell me," she wrote, "of the serious condition of Mother de la Fayette, and the next you announce to me her death, which grieves me deeply. It is a loss for the whole Order, and particularly for our house. I cannot express to you the grief which I feel; it is too great. I pray you to tell all our daughters that I sympathize with their sorrow, and to assure them that they will always find me ready to make proof of the friendship which I have for them, and which I had for the Mother they are mourning."[418] The picture which is presented of Henrietta through the medium of the Chaillot Papers, though in no sense false, is necessarily one-sided. All persons are influenced by the surroundings in which they find themselves, and if the Queen of England appeared to the nuns as a woman of almost saintly piety, whose every thought was given to heaven, and whose sorrows had completely detached her from the world, it is because thus she really was in their gentle society within the charmed walls of their convent. They did not see her in the outside world, where thorny problems again beset her, and where her old faults of temper and judgment tended to reappear. She had ever been not only a woman of strong religious and moral principle, but one whose qualities of heart and head had gained her more affection than often falls to the lot of a royal lady, and the effect of Chaillot was to emphasize and develop every virtue and charm she possessed, and to throw completely into the background all that was harsh and discordant and unlovely. Among the many portraits which remain to show her "in her habit as she lived" is one which represents her as the recluse of Chaillot, and which brings strong corroboration to the loving pen-and-ink sketches of the good nuns. A woman, still comely and showing the remains of great beauty, looks out upon us from the canvas; the heavy mourning dress corresponds with the deep melancholy of the face, and if there are no tears in the eyes, it is only because the painter has caught that saddest of all moments, when "The eyes are weary and give o'er, But still the soul weeps as before."[419]