Madame de Longueville, who had recovered from the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the Throne of Versailles, and the Municipality of Paris, became smitten with the author of the _Maximes_[365], and was as faithful to him as she was able. The latter lives less by his "thoughts" than by the friendship of Madame de La Fayette[366], Madame de Sévigné, the verses of La Fontaine, and the love of Madame de Longueville: see whither illustrious attachments lead. The Princesse de Condé[367], when on the point of death, said to Madame de Brienne[368]: "My dear friend, acquaint that poor wretch who is at Stenay of the state in which you see me, and let her learn how to die." Fine words; but the Princess forgot that she herself had been loved by Henry IV., and that, when her husband carried her to Brussels, she had wanted to rejoin the Bearnese, "to escape at night by a window, and then to do thirty or forty leagues on horse-back;" she was at that time a "poor wretch" of seventeen. Descending the cliff, I found myself on the high-road to Paris; it ascends swiftly on leaving Dieppe. On the right, on the rising slope of a bank, stands the wall of a cemetery; by the side of that wall was fixed the wheel of a rope-walk. Two rope-spinners, walking backwards in line, and swinging from leg to leg, were softly singing together. I listened: they had come to that couplet of the _Vieux caporal_, a fine poetic lie, which has brought us to our present state: Qui là-bas sanglote et regarde? Eh! c'est la veuve du tambour, etc[369]. Those men uttered the refrain: Conscrits au pas; ne pleurez pas . . . Marchez au pas, au pas[370], in a voice so manly and so pathetic that the tears came to my eyes. Whilst themselves keeping step and twisting their hemp, they appeared to be spinning out the old corporal's dying moments: there was something, I cannot say what, in that glory peculiar to Béranger, thus lonesomely revealed by two sailors singing a soldier's death within view of the sea. [Sidenote: Dieppe.] The cliff reminded me of a monarchical greatness, the road of a plebeian celebrity: I compared in thought the men at the two extremities of society, and I asked myself to which of those eras I should have preferred to belong. When the present shall have disappeared like the past, which of those two renowns will the most attract the notice of posterity?