From the passage of Racine through Saint-Cyr, and that of Fénelon, there resulted (from the point of view of the foundation and its object) a number of unsuitable things in the midst of their graces. Fénelon developed a taste for refined and subtile piety suited only for choice souls; Racine, without intending it, created a taste for reading, poesy, and all such things, the perfume of which is sweet, but the fruit not always salutary. Mme. de Maintenon, however influenced she might herself be by these tastes, recognized with her natural good sense the necessity of finding a remedy, and of not allowing those young and tender spirits, some of whom were already taken with the new ideas, to go farther in that direction. Among the first pupils and mistresses of Saint-Cyr was a certain Mme. de La Maisonfort, a distinguished woman, with an inquiring spirit, fond of investigating, and made for quite another career than that which she had chosen. She could not bring herself to renounce the gratifications of her mind and taste or the sensitiveness of her feelings. Mme. de Maintenon made war upon them in a number of very fine letters, which did not convince her. "How will you bear," she writes to her, "the crosses that God will send you in the course of your life if a Norman or a Picard accent hinders you, or a man disgusts you because he is not as sublime as Racine? The latter, poor man, would have edified you could you have seen his humility during his illness, and his repentance for his search after intellect. He did not ask at such a time for a fashionable confessor; he saw none but a worthy priest of his own parish." That example of the dying Racine did not work successfully. Mme. de La Maisonfort was one of those rare persons whom we see from time to time soaring to the summit of all the investigations of their epoch, supreme and refined judges of works of intellect, oracles and proselytes of the opinions in vogue. She could play charmingly at Jansenism with Racine and M. de Troisville, and distil Quietism with Fénelon, as in the eighteenth century she might have fallen in love with David Hume in company with the Comtesse de Boufflers, or in the nineteenth she would surely have shone in a _doctrinaire_ salon discussing psychology and æstheticism, perhaps even going so far as the Fathers of the Church, not without adverting, as she passed, to socialism. Mme. de La Maisonfort, much as she was liked by Mme. de Maintenon, was, necessarily, dismissed from the Institute of Saint-Cyr.