Mme. de Maintenon was made for this sort of internal domestic government. She had the gift and the art of it; she enjoyed the full pleasure of it. That is no reason why we should estimate her merit to be less. Because she sought repose in action, delights in authority and familiarity, and because her self-love (from which we never part) found its satisfaction there, we should not the less admire her. An ancient poet, Simonides of Amorgos, in a satire against women, compares them for their dominant defects, when they are bad, to various species of animals (those Ancients were not gallant), but when he comes to a wise, useful, frugal, industrious, diligent, and fruitful woman he compares her to the bee. Mme. de Maintenon, in the bosom of this establishment of which she was the soul and the mother, ruling the hive in every sense, may be likened to the indefatigable bee. Such she had been all her life in the houses where she lived on a footing of friendship; putting them into order, cleanliness, decency, spreading a spirit of work about her, and at the same time doing honour also to the spirit of society and courtesy. What must it therefore have been in her own domain, her own foundation, in the hive of her predilection, with all her joy and all her pride as queen-bee and mother, having at last succeeded in producing the perfect ideal that was in her? That ideal was patriotic and Christian both. One day, in an interview, the record of which was written down by her pious pupils, after telling them how little premeditated and foreseen was her great fortune at Court, she said with a transport and fire we should scarcely expect of her, but which was in her whenever she dwelt on a cherished topic: "That is how it was with Saint-Cyr, which became insensibly what you see it to-day. I have often told you that I do not like new establishments; it is far better to support old ones. And yet, almost without thinking of it, I have made a new one. Every one believes that I, my head on my pillow, have planned this fine institution; but it is not so. God has brought about Saint-Cyr by degrees. If I had made a plan, I should have thought of the worries of execution, the difficulties, the details. I should have feared them; I should have said: 'All this is far beyond me;' courage would have failed me. Much compassion for indigent nobility, because I have been orphaned and poor myself, and knowledge of such a life, made me desire to assist it in my lifetime. But, while planning to do the good I could, I never dreamed of doing it after my death. That was a second thought, born of the first. May this establishment last as long as France itself, and France as long as the world! Nothing is dearer to me than my children of Saint-Cyr; I love their very dust. I offer myself, and all my attendants to serve them; I have no reluctance to be their servant if my service will teach them to do without that of others. It is to this I tend; this is my passion, this is my heart."