It was perhaps by this naïve brusqueness, and also by her solid qualities as an honest woman (I was going to say an honest man), that she pleased Louis XIV., so that between herself and him there was formed a friendship which was not without its singularity, and which at first sight seems surprising. Mme. de Sévigné, in a letter to her daughter, seems to think that Madame felt for Louis XIV. (as the preceding Madame had done) an inclination that was more or less romantic, and which affected her without her admitting to herself exactly what it was. There is a little too much that is far-fetched in all this. In general, as I have already remarked, Mme. de Sévigné understands Madame very little, and does not give herself the trouble to seek the meaning of a nature so little French. When she hears that the princess fainted with grief at the sudden news of the death of her father, the Elector Palatine, Mme. de Sévigné jests about it thus: "On this, Madame began to cry and weep and make a strange noise; they said she fainted, but I do not believe it; she seems to me incapable of that sign of weakness. All that death could do would be to sober her spirits,"--_fixer ses esprits_, because _ses esprits_ (in the language of the physics of the day) were always in movement and great agitation. But let us leave for a moment such French pleasantry and this facility for trifling with everything and over-refining all things. Madame, married in so sad and hapless a manner, and with whom one had only to talk, it was said, to be disgusted at once with the painful conditions of marriage,--Madame was not the woman to fall back upon romance to console her for reality. Thrown into the midst of a brilliant but false Court, full at that time of gallantry and pleasures which merely covered ambitions and rivalries, she distinguished with an instinct of good sense and a certain pride of race the person to whom she could attach herself in the midst of all these people, and she turned with her natural uprightness to the most honest man among them, namely, to Louis XIV. himself. A Jesuit, who pronounced a funeral oration over Madame, Père Cathalan, has said on this subject all that was best to say. In the kingdom at that time was a king who was worthy of being one; with the good qualities we know well, combined with defects which every one about him sought to favour and encourage; a king who was essentially a man of merit, "always master and always king, but more of an honest man and Christian than he was master or king."