Cardinal de Noailles is certainly a virtuous cardinal of great merit, which all cardinals are not. We have four here, each different. Three have this in common, that they are all as false as gibbet-wood, but in face and temper they are quite different. Cardinal de Polignac is well-bred; he has capacity; he is insinuating, his voice is soft; he is too much given to politics and sycophancy, which makes him commit the faults for which people blame him. Cardinal de Rohan has a fine face, like his mother [Mme. de Soubise, one of Louis XIV.'s mistresses], but he has no figure; he is vain as a peacock, full of whims, intriguing, a slave to the Jesuits; he thinks he governs everything, but really governs nothing; he believes that he is without an equal in this world. Cardinal de Bissy is ugly; he has the face of a clumsy peasant; he is proud, malignant, and false; more dissimulating than any one imagines; a sickening flatterer, you see his falseness in his eyes; he has capacity, but uses it only to do harm. These three cardinals could put the Noailles in a sack and sell him without his knowing it, as the proverb says; they are all three far more shrewd than he. Bissy and Tartuffe are as like as two drops of water; Bissy has just Tartuffe's manners. Wolves are going about in bands of eight and ten and attacking travellers; the extreme severity of the cold is the reason of this; it is causing great misfortunes. In Paris eight poor washerwomen were at work on a boat; the ice cut the rope like a razor; the boat was crushed into bits; one of the women had the presence of mind to jump from one cake of ice to another, and they had time to throw her a rope and save her; but all the others perished. The head of one was cut off by the ice, and the body of another was cut through; that was an awful thing, and what made it more terrible was that the woman was pregnant, and when the ice cut her open the head of a child appeared. What can be imagined more dreadful than that! PARIS, 1716. I had completely won my husband during the last three years of his life; I had brought him round to laugh with me at his weaknesses, and to take what I said pleasantly without being irritated. He no longer allowed any one to calumniate and attack me in his presence; he had a just confidence in me; he always took my part. But previously to that I had suffered horribly. I was just about to become happy when our Lord God took away my poor husband, and I saw disappear in one instant the result of all the cares and pains I had taken for thirty years to make myself happy. I am subject to attacks of the spleen, and when anything agitates me my left side swells up as big as a child's head. I do not like to stay in bed; as soon as I wake I want to be up.