Did not a preacher speak of her in the pulpit as “Magdalen not yet repentant, but already charitable?” and add, too, that “The hand which gives so well will not be refused when knocking at the gates of Paradise?” And why? Because all who were in trouble had but to turn to Guimard for help--poor players, artists, poets, all. Because, though every year she received a handsome present from Soubise, one year, in 1768, when the winter had dealt cruelly with the Paris poor, she begged that instead of sending her jewellery, the Prince would send her the equivalent in money, and when she received it she added more, and herself went to all the poor folk in her neighbourhood and fed the starving; went unostentatiously, from simple good-heartedness and sympathy; and it was the populace who spoke of it, not she. She had her foibles, her little vanities perhaps, as when at Longchamps one summer she appeared in an equipage most gorgeously embellished with somewhat startling arms--mistletoe growing out of a gold mark, which glowed in the middle of a shield, the Graces serving as supports, with a group of Cupids as a crown. Guimard could be jealous on occasion. A Mlle. Dervieux, appearing as a singer at the Academy without success, had the audacity to reappear as a dancer and triumph. This Madeleine would possibly not have minded, but her own pet poet Dorat celebrated Mlle. Dervieux’s success in verse, and this poetic infidelity was more than Madeleine could stand, with the consequence that all the pamphleteers of Paris were forthwith ranged on sides and a paper war took place between the rival supporters of the two fair dancers, characters were torn to rags, and in the course of time the battle burnt itself out, as such usually do, without anyone being seriously the worse. Strangely enough it was just at this time that Guimard herself elected to make an appearance as a singer. When there was a revival of some of the old pieces in the repertoire of the Royal Academy, including “Les Fêtes d’Hébé ou les Talents Lyriques,” for which Rameau had written the music, Guimard appeared in this as Aglaia, one of the three Graces--“with song and dance,” as one might say to-day. But it was, as so often the case in modern days, only the charm of the dance that made it possible to forgive the disillusion of the song, for Madeleine’s voice was thin and hard.