"Madame," replied Madame de Coislin, "I know nothing about my inside confessor; I only know that my confessor is in the inside of his confessional." Thereupon the two ladies saw each other no more. Madame de Coislin prided herself on having introduced a novelty at Court, the fashion of floating chignons, in spite of Queen Marie Leczinska[668], who was very pious and who opposed this dangerous innovation. She held that formerly no genteel person would ever have thought of paying her doctor. Crying out against the plentifulness of women's linen: "That smacks of the upstart," she said; "we women of the Court had only two shifts: when they were worn out, we renewed them; we were dressed in silk gowns, and we did not look like grisettes, like the young ladies of nowadays." Madame Suard[669], who lived in the Rue Royale, had a cock whose crowing annoyed Madame de Coislin. She wrote to Madame Suard: "Madame, have your cock's throat cut." Madame Suard sent back the messenger with this note: "Madame, I have the honour to reply to you that I shall not have my cock's throat cut." The correspondence went no further. Madame de Coislin said to Madame de Chateaubriand: "Ah, my heart, what a time we live in! And yet it's that Panckoucke girl, the wife of that member of the Academy[670], you know." M. Hennin[671], a former clerk at the Foreign Office, and as tedious as a protocol, used to scribble fat novels. One day he was reading a description to Madame de Coislin: a tearful and abandoned love-lorn woman was mournfully fishing a salmon. Madame de Coislin, who was growing impatient, and who disliked salmon, interrupted the author and said with the serious air which made her so comical: "Monsieur Hennin, could you not make that lady catch a different fish?" The stories which Madame de Coislin told could not be recollected, for there was nothing in them; all lay in the pantomime, the accent, and the expression of the narrator: she never laughed. There was one dialogue between "Monsieur and Madame Jacqueminot," the perfection of which surpassed everything. When, in the conversation between the husband and wife, Madame Jacqueminot rejoined, "But, _Monsieur Jacqueminot!_" the name was pronounced in such a tone that you were seized with immoderate laughter. Obliged to let this pass, Madame de Coislin gravely waited, taking snuff. Reading in a newspaper of the death of several kings, she took off her spectacles, and blowing her nose, said: "There is an epizootic among crowned cattle." [Sidenote: Death of Madame de Coislin.] At the moment when she was ready to breathe her last, they were maintaining by her bedside that one succumbed only through letting one's self go; that, if one paid great attention, and never lost sight of the enemy, one would not die at all. "I believe it," she said; "but I fear that something would distract me." She expired.