The gardens have long since given place to meadows and thickets. An old orange house with broken glass is half in ruins. The basins have disappeared. Here is, however, the canal where M. du Plessis, tutor of the children of M. de Pomponne, tried to down himself. The little bridge, near which Madame de Sévigné went to wait for her visitors or her mail, no longer exists, but the abutments mark its position, and, there also, an iron gate which assuredly dates from the time of the Abbé de Coulanges still hangs between two stone pillars. And this poor remnant of the ancient architecture is sufficient to render more lively the little picture which Madame de Sévigné has drawn in one of her letters: "I pace about the little bridge; I emerge from the 'Humor of my Daughter' and look through the 'Humor of my Mother' to see if La Beauce (one of her lackeys) does not come; and then I walk up again and return to put my nose into the end of the path which leads to the little bridge; and by dint of taking this walk, I see this dear letter come, and I receive it and read it with all the sentiments which you may imagine." (August 4, 1677.) And naturally, nothing exists of the two alleys which had been given those singular names, "under which"--the remark is by Father Mesnard, the best of the biographers of Madame de Sévigné--"one cannot fail to imagine the so different tastes of the mother and of the daughter, their so opposite characters, their occasional poutings, and their promenades separated after some quarrel, and which make us always think, the one of a beautiful smiling alley, full of light and verdure, the other of some path more cramped, more sad and more dry." In the park, if we no longer promenade under the very trees that sheltered the reveries of Madame de Sévigné, the alleys at least have remained rectilinear and still present the perspectives which were ingeniously arranged by the gardener of the Abbé de Coulanges. Finally, the "little view" which charmed Madame de Sévigné has not changed. There is always, beyond the meadows and the park, the same horizon harmoniously bounded by a swell of land covered with woods--a gracious site, ennobled by so many beautiful memories that, if we were not entirely barbarous, we would have to save it from the woodcutters and the builders. Ah! if there could only be found some friend of Madame de Sévigné to prevent them from touching the "pretty solitude!" THE END FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Page 28. Bossuet by Rebelliau, in the series "Grands Écrivains français."] [Footnote 2: Page 42. Le Naturaliste Bosc. Un Girondin herborisant, by Auguste Rey.--Versailles, published by Bernard.] [Footnote 3: Page 45. Mémoires de Larêveillière-Lêpeaux.] [Footnote 4: Page 53. Mémoires de Larêveillière-Lêpeaux, Vol. I, page 167.]