Madame de la Fayette's expression mingled with so much kindness. Although I never allow myself to forget this truth, I confess I was quite surprised; for as yet I feel no decay to remind me of it. However, I often reflect and calculate, and find the conditions on which we enjoy life very hard. It seems to me that I was dragged, in spite of myself, to the fatal term when one must suffer old age. I see it--am there. I should at least like to go no farther in the road of decrepitude, pain, loss of memory, and disfigurement, which are at hand to injure me. I hear a voice that says, 'Even against your will you must go on; or, if you, refuse, you must die;' which is another necessity from which nature shrinks. Such is the fate of those who go a little too far. What is their resource? To think of the will of God, and the universal law; and so restore reason to its place, and be patient. Be you, then, patient, my dear child, and let not your affection soften into such tears as reason must condemn." As Madame de Sevigne would not return to Paris, her friends heard with pleasure that she had resolved to go to Grignan, the residence of her daughter in Provence. Here the greater part of her remaining life was spent, and the correspondence with her daughter entirely ceases from this time. Madame de Sevigne died, after a sudden and short illness, in April, 1696, at the age of seventy. It may gratify some to know that the letters of Madame de Sevigne were apparently written in haste, beginning the writing on the second page of the paper, continuing to the third and fourth, and returning to the first: she used neither sand nor blotting-paper. Speaking to her daughter, Madame de S. says, "The princess is always saying that she is going to write to you; she mends her pens; for her writing is a great affair, and her letters a sort of embroidery; not done in a moment. _We_ should never finish, were we to make fine twists and twirls to our _D's_ and _L's_;" in allusion to the German and Italian fashion of the day of making ornaments with their pens, called _lacs d'amour_. The letters were sealed on both sides, and a piece of white floss silk fastened it entirely round.