Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie was in fact a character of rare worth. In our account of him, we have not had to show him as the man of fine culture, the scholar in constant correspondence with Baluze, purchasing and collecting Greek and Latin manuscripts, the skilled patron of the printing-press, the bibliophile to whom we owe the preservation of the original text of Molière. He was a worthy representative of his period, the great epoch in French history. The seventeenth century attained the furthest extremes in good as in evil. It was then that France produced her greatest captains, her greatest statesmen, her most illustrious judges; it was then that the greatest names in literature, art, philosophy, and scholarship dazzled the world; then that the 'daughters of charity' displayed their devotion; that Madame de Chantal diffused around her the sweet perfume of her virtues; but it was then, too, that a Marquise de Brinvilliers extended the boundaries of crime, and an Abbé de Guibourg murdered children upon an altar, over the bare body of a Marquise de Montespan. THE DEATH OF 'MADAME'[12] Who has not read Bossuet's funeral oration on Henrietta Anne of England, Duchess of Orleans? Who has not thrilled at the echo of that powerful and poignant apostrophe?--'O woful night! O awful night, when there rang through the air like a sudden thunderclap the amazing tidings, Madame is dying, Madame is dead!... Madame passed from morn to eve like the grass of the field. In the morning she flourished, with what graces you know; in the evening we saw her cut down.... What awful speed! In nine hours the work is accomplished.' Bossuet's masterpiece has crowned the memory of Madame with an immortal halo in which the charms, the quick and exquisite imagination of the young princess, who enchanted her contemporaries,--the lady who set the tone for taste and wit in the midst of the wittiest and most brilliant Court the world has ever known--will shine resplendent through the ages.