Madame and Saint-Simon have this in common--they were two honest souls at Court, honest souls whom indignation easily roused; often passionate, prejudiced, and at such times ferocious and pitiless for the adversary. Saint-Simon--need it be said?--has over Madame all the superiority of a genius expressly made to sound and fathom hearts, and to bring back living descriptions, which he gives us in strokes of flame. Madame, often credulous, looking elsewhere, mixing things up and little critical in her judgments, nevertheless sees well what she does see, and renders it forcibly, with a violence which, though little conformed to French taste, is none the less imprinted on the memory. They knew each other and esteemed each other. They had, without suspecting it, the same idiosyncrasies, which they observed, reciprocally, in each other; one was astride of her rank as princess and ever on the _qui-vive_ lest it should not be sufficiently respected; the other, as we know, was intractable and even fanatical on the chapter of dukes and peers. Saint-Simon has spoken of Madame with truth and justice, as of a manly nature somewhat in keeping with his own. All that we read in Madame's letters, in which she declares herself to every eye, is only a sort of demonstration and commentary of Saint-Simon's judgment upon her. Madame was naturally just, humane, compassionate. She was very anxious about her debts and her creditors, which the great of the earth are not apt to be, and it was noticed that she was never easy unless she had secured their payment,--"forestalling demands, sometimes wishes, and always impatience or complaints." The letters she writes during the terrible winter of 1709 breathe pity for the poor, who "are dying of cold like flies." No princess ever had more consideration for those who surrounded her and served her; "she preferred sometimes to deprive herself of necessary attentions, rather than require them when inconvenient to others." She was what is called a good mistress, and the nearer her people came to her, the more they regretted her. "Saint-Cloud," she wrote in the autumn of 1717, "is only a house for summer; many of my people have to lodge in rooms without fireplaces; they cannot pass the winter here, or I should be the cause of their deaths, and I am not hard enough for that; the sufferings of others make me pitiful."