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Some few years previously, with that polished and elegant vein which intercourse with so many superior minds tends to create, she had written, as though she had foreseen that she would not despair of her spiritual future, a short but charming panegyric upon Hope. Bussy-Rabutin has preserved this relic in one of his letters.
Bussy-Rabutin was handsome, witty, brilliant, a bel esprit, a member of the Academie Francaise, and very much in love with his charming cousin, who clearly appreciated his talents, if not his character. "You are the fagot of my intellect," she says to him; but she forbids him to talk of love. Unfortunately for himself, his vanity got the better of his discretion.
The ultimate success of the book being prodigious, Mlle Michallet must, by the time she was marriageable, have become a remarkable parti, but the story is not one which commends itself to the Incorporated Society of Authors. "Les Caractères" was published in January 1688, and the critics, with the veteran Bussy-Rabutin at their head, welcomed it with shouts of applause.
"It appears to be only friendship," writes Mme. de Scudery to Bussy-Rabutin; "in short the fear of God on both sides, and perhaps policy, have cut the wings of love. She is his favorite and his first friend." "I do not believe he has ever been what one calls in love," writes Mme. de Sevigne.
It was also marked by the gradual disappearance of the great lights in literature. La Fontaine died in 1695, Racine in 1699. Boileau was as good as dead; Mesdames de la Sabliere and de la Fayette, Pellisson and Bussy-Rabutin, La Bruyere and Madame Sevigne, all died about this time.
Clotilde, 'Down with the cows! meaning the police, sir," said the concierge. "And were you in the service of M. Genlis then?" said M. Formery. "No, sir; I was in the service of M. Bussy-Rabutin, the Royalist deputy." "You don't seem to have very well-defined political convictions," said M. Formery. "Oh, yes, sir, I have," the concierge protested.
As the fighting ended and manoeuvring became the game, of course Mazarin came uppermost, Mazarin, that super-Italian, finessing and fascinating, so deadly sweet, l'homme plus agréable du monde, as Madame de Motteville and Bussy-Rabutin call him, flattering that he might win, avaricious that he might be magnificent, winning kings by jewelry and princesses by lapdogs, too cowardly for any avoidable collision, too cool and economical in his hatred to waste an antagonist by killing him, but always luring and cajoling him into an unwilling tool, too serenely careless of popular emotion even to hate the mob of Paris, any more than a surgeon hates his own lancet when it cuts him; he only changes his grasp and holds it more cautiously.
The correspondence of Bussy-Rabutin furnishes us with a scene of that description: "It is rumoured that Querouaille has been sermonising the King, crucifix in hand, as well both to wean him from other women as to bring him back to Christianity: in fact, it appears that she herself has been very near the point of death.
Of them she had many, often very deeply smitten with her; all remained faithful to her, and, she deserted none of them, though they might be put on trial and condemned like Fouquet, or perfidious and cruel like her cousin M. de Bussy-Rabutin.
Representatives of the second class were the Prince de Conti, the great Turenne, various counts and marquises, and Bussy-Rabutin, who was a type of the sensual lover and the more dangerous on account of the privileges he enjoyed because of his close relationship to Mme. de Sévigné.
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