adherence to a fashion; but, when the manner is graceful, smiling, unaffected, and original, the pretension is lost in the pleasure derived. All this was natural to madame de Coulanges. Her confessor said of her. "Each of this lady's sins is an epigram." When recovering from a severe illness, madame de Sévigné announced, as the sign of her convalescence, "Epigrams are beginning to be pointed;" not that by epigrams sarcasms were meant, but merely novel turns of expression, words wittily applied, ideas full of finesse, that pleased by their originality. She and her husband were, perhaps, too much alike to accord well: she was annoyed at his want of dignity, and the heedlessness that, joined to her extravagance, left them poor and himself unconsidered. He liked to be where he was more at his ease than in his wife's company. Her faults, however, diminished as she grew old. She learnt to appreciate the court at its true value. She ceased her attendance on madame de Maintenon; but her intimacy with Ninon de l'Enclos continued to the end of her life. The ingratitude of her court friends, the smallness of her fortune, her advancing age, and consequent loss of beauty, and her weak health, rendered her neither crabbed nor sad: on the contrary, she became indulgent, gentle, and contented. Her husband preserved his characteristics to the end. When exhorted by a preacher to more serious habits, he replied by an impromptu:-- "Je voudrois, à mon âge, Il en seroit le temps, Etre moins volage Que les jeunes gens, Et mettre en usage D'un vieillard bien sage Tous les sentimens. "Je voudrois du viel homme Etre séparé; Le morceau de pomme N'est pas digéré."[70] He died at the advanced age of eighty. During the earlier portion of the correspondence, madame Scarron figures as one of the favourite guests of the Fauxbourg. Her husband was dead, and she was living at the Hôtel d'Albret, among her earliest friends. The latter correspondence is full of anecdotes about her, as madame de Maintenon, and indicate her gradual advancement; but those which speak of her early days, when she was the char&i and ornament of her circle, merely through her talents, and agreeable and excellent qualities, are the most interesting.