Madame Deshoulières burned with desire for dramatic honours, and she wrote a tragedy called _Genséric_. It was a feeble, ill-constructed piece of work, and was ill-received; but it was not to be forgotten, for it perpetuated the immortal figure of speech, as familiar in England as in France, of the advice to her—“Return to your sheep” (_anglicé_—“Let us go back to our muttons”).[8] Once again she wooed the drama in the guise of comedy and opera; but her efforts were signal failures. She died at the age of sixty-two, of the same malady as her godmother, and, like her, she bore the cruel suffering with patience and resignation, writing in the intervals of pain a paraphrase of the Psalms, and her _Reflections Morales_, one of her best works. Bossuet, who administered to her the last consolations of religion, spoke in warm eulogy of those last days of hers. A singular circumstance disturbed the smooth flow of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos’ life at this time. It was the sudden appearance of an aged woman who declared herself to be Marion Delorme, and claiming a fifty-seven years’ friendship with Ninon. She declared that the report of her death had been false; that the doctor, Guy Patin, had not attended her funeral; but had saved her life, and then she had left Paris and lived out of France. Convinced as Ninon was, that the poor woman was demented, or attempting to impose on her, she sent to the Street of the Dry Tree, where Guy Patin lived; but the doctor was absent in Prussia, sharing the exile of his son, who had been condemned for being in possession of six copies of one of the libellous pamphlets that made life hideous for the king and Madame Louis Quatorze, and no other testimony, for or against, was to be found. The magistrate to whom the unhappy creature had applied to verify her identity, hastened a little later to assure Ninon that to communicate with Guy Patin would be troubling him to no purpose; since the Marion Delorme, as she called herself, had given unmistakable proof of madness, and she had been placed in the Hôtel Dieu. So the matter ended.