Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/24

2 illustrious in his day and still remarkable for sentiment and elegance; the same Bertaut whom Boileau praised for his reserve, and Ronsard judged to be "too virtuous a poet." I remark at once on this basis of virtue, which seems to have been inherent in the race. Madame de Motteville had a younger sister who was called from her infancy Socratine, on account of her austerity, which ended by making her a Carmelite. This austerity, much softened and adorned in the elder sister, deserved in her the name of reason and good sense ; and it was thus that those who knew her only by reputation spoke of her. "Melise may pass for one of the most sensible preeieuses of the island of Delos," says the "Grand Dictionnaire des Précieuses."

Mademoiselle Bertaut had received a very careful and very literary education. Her father, Pierre Bertaut, was gentleman-in-ordinary of the king's bed-chamber. Her mother, who came of a noble family in Spain and had lived her youth in that country, was noticed by Anne of Austria in the early days after the queen's arrival in France. Knowing Spanish as her own language, she was employed by the queen for her family correspondence and treated as a friend. She profited by this favour to give, as they said in those days, meaning to attach to the queen's service, her daughter, then seven years old (1628). But Cardinal Richelieu, always uneasy about the queen's surroundings and anxious to cut off her communications with Spain, removed the little girl, an act to which Anne of Austria strongly objected. To all her complaints "they answered," so Madame de Motteville tells us, "that my mother was half Spanish, that she had much intelligence, that already I spoke Spanish and might resemble her." Madame Bertaut accordingly took her daughter, now ten years old, to Normandy, where she completed her education with care. The young girl