"The more I see of the princess, the more satisfied I am. We had a public conversation, in which she said nothing, and that is saying all. Her waist is very beautiful, one might say perfect, and her modesty would please you. We supped and she did not fail in anything, and has a charming politeness to every one; but to me and my son she fails in nothing, and behaves as you might have done. She was much looked at and observed; and all present seemed in good faith to be satisfied. Her air is noble, her manners polished and agreeable; I have pleasure in telling you such good of her, for I find that, without prepossession or flattery, I can do so and that everything obliges me to do so." Now, shall I venture to express my thought? There is certainly a mention of modesty in one or two places in the letter; but it is of the modest _air_, the good effect produced, the grace that depended on it. For all the rest it is impossible to find on these pages anything other than a charming physical, external, and mundane description, without the slightest concern as to inward and moral qualities. Evidently the king is as little concerned about those as he is deeply anxious about externals. Let the princess succeed and please, let her charm and amuse, let her adorn the Court and enliven it, give her a good confessor, a sound Jesuit, and for all the rest let her be and do what pleases her; the king asks nothing else: that is the impression left upon me by that letter. If there had entered into this letter written from Montargis even a flash of moral solicitude in the midst of the record of those external graces and perfect proprieties, Louis XIV. would not have been, after twelve years' hourly intimacy, the odious and hard grandfather of the scene at Marly near the carp basin, to the mother of his expected heir. I send the reader for the details and the accessories of that singular scene to Saint-Simon, who in this instance is our Tacitus, the Tacitus of a king not naturally cruel, but who was so that day by force of egotism and selfishness. That first letter from Montargis, so elegant, so smiling on the outward surface, covered in its depths the vanity and egotism of a master, solicitude solely for decorum and curtseying--the scene at the basin of carp concludes it. I shall not reproduce here the divers portraits of the Duchesse de Bourgogne; I should have to take them from many sources, but above all from Saint-Simon. She was neither handsome nor pretty, she was better than either. Each feature of her face taken separately might seem defective, even ugly, but from all these uglinesses, these defects, these irregularities arranged by the hand of the Graces, came a nameless harmony of her person, a delightful _ensemble_, the movement and airy whirl of which enchanted both eyes and soul. In moral qualities it was the same.