Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/488

474, often made her read to him negociations and treaties; dictated dispatches to her, and sometimes desired her to make them, as an exercise.

She thus became accustomed to great affairs, and had a taste even for the most abstract sciences, which her extreme facility made a pleasure to teach her. She possessed also great facility in learning languages, and a talent for painting and poetry, which last she exerted only upon religious subjects.

At the age of twenty she married the duke de Liancour, who was only twenty-two. He was a dissipated young man; but sincerely loved and esteemed his wife, who made no other use of her power over him than to fix in his mind the principles of religion, which he held too lightly. They lived together fifty-four years, and the duke's levity during the first eighteen never made the least alteration in their affection for each other. She mourned in secret for his ill conduct; but her kindness never abated, and her patience, her good counsel, and her prayers, were at length heard, and a ray of wisdom beamed on the heart of her husband. Twice had he been attacked by infectious diseases, during which she assiduously attended him, not only ministering to his complaints, but exhorting and instructing upon the vanity and nothingness of this life, and the wisdom of living for eternity.

To draw him from the societies which perverted his principles, she beautified his country seat, so that it surpassed every thing then in France. She designed the gardens and buildings, and presided over them herself. She invited to it men of literature and agreeable talents, and by little and little enticed him from a court, where he had not strength of mind to live virtuously. They