La Rochefoucauld told Mme de Sable that he depended on her for his knowledge of the inmost windings of the human heart. When he returned to Paris, this lady was approaching the age of sixty. Her _salon_ competed with that of the Hotel de Rambouillet and that of Mlle de Montpensier at the Luxembourg. The Marquise de Sable had been gay in her youth, but when her young lover, Armentieres, was killed in a duel, she turned devout. She also turned hypochondriacal and literary. According to Tallemont des Reaux, who has left a portrait of her which is equally ill-natured and entertaining, she built herself a house adjoining the choir of the church of Port Royal, in the Faubourg St. Jacques. Her friend, the Abbe d'Ailly, who edited her works after her death in 1678, admits that she was "one of the greatest visionaries in the world on the chapter of death." She herself expressed her hypochondria otherwise: "I fear death more than other people do, because no one has ever formed so clear a conception of nothingness as I have." Ludicrous stories were told of her excessive fear of illness, and in her fits of alarm she found comfort from the ministrations of Antoine Singlin, who was the director of Pascal's conscience.[2] She became intimate with Arnauld d'Andilly, and with the rest of those Jansenist authors of whom Racine said that their works were "the admiration of scholars and the consolation of all pious persons." But she seems to have had the cleverness to observe that in one respect the literature of Port Royal, as it expressed itself before "Les Provinciales," had the fault of being verbose and redundant. Mme. de Sable deserves more merit than seems to have been given to her for her fervent cultivation of precise language. [Footnote 2: It was of Singlin that Pascal wrote in 1654, "Soumission total a J.C. et a mon directeur."]