Such a sight must have moved the least susceptible--to have beheld the Palatine thus redeem her past errors. She was anxious to write with her own hand the account of her conversion, and addressed it to the celebrated Rance, the Abbe of La Trappe. It was from that narrative that Bossuet drew the source of his own. Some few years previously, with that polished and elegant vein which intercourse with so many superior minds tends to create, she had written, as though she had foreseen that she would not despair of her spiritual future, a short but charming panegyric upon Hope. Bussy-Rabutin has preserved this relic in one of his letters. "I have never in my life," he says, with no doubt a little too much enthusiasm, "seen anything better or more delicately written." There is to be found in it, it is true, a happy inspiration and a passage capable of pleasing minds struggling with difficulties. "It is permitted to us," she says, "to measure our hope by our courage, it is noble to sustain it amidst trials; but it is not less glorious to suffer the entire ruin of it with the same high-heartedness which had dared to conceive it." Those are noble sentiments, and revealing a vigorous mental power. The end of the Princess Palatine (1681) showed clearly that she had not, for the mere pleasure of expressing herself elegantly, vaunted the delights of a saint-like hope. "Ready to render up her soul," says Bossuet, "she was heard to utter in dying accents, 'I am about to see how God will treat me, but I hope for His mercy.'" Such was the close of that life, the piety of which illuminated its latter years; such was the death of that Princess who, after having been remarkable among the women of her time for her beauty, her errors, and, at last, by her penitence, had the rare good fortune to be praised by the most illustrious of historians, priests, and authors of the great century. Our notice of this celebrated woman would be incomplete without a passing glance at the singular fortunes of Henri de Guise, subsequent to his desertion of his first love, Anne de Gonzagua.