Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/33

Rh she says; "as for me, I find that the length of the play diminishes the pleasure, and I think that verses, repeated naturally, represent conversation more easily and touch the mind better than song delights the ear." All this shows a right mind and a noble heart, rather than a nature inclined to tenderness or passion. Italian comedy, played before the cardinal, excited the enthusiasm of certain courtiers, such as the Mardchal de Grammont and the Due de Mortemart, who seemed enchanted by the very names of the minor actors, and "all together, in order to please the minister, uttered such great exaggerations when they spoke of them that Italian comedy became wearisome to persons who were moderate in speech." Madame de Motteville was one of those moderate persons, and she gives us in those words the tone of her own soul. Thus, when I say she was by taste somewhat a contemporary of Corneille, the reader sees in what sense it must be understood, and how she corrected all exaggeration of it.

Though she likes to recall and repeat the following gallant lines of her uncle,

her heart was more fitted for friendship than for love ; she was made, in all ways, for correct and regulated sentiments, for happy equanimity, and she expresses a desire for them more than once. From her beautiful Normandy she had gained a love of nature and of country life ; but she could not enjoy it on a hasty journey. "The country," she says, "is beautiful with repose and solitude only when we can taste the innocent pleasure that the beauty of Nature affords us in woods and on the shores of rivers." She says elsewhere, speaking of kings: "I think those happy who know