Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/95



" garde à moi, ma fille, et couvre moi bien!" Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, writing from France to her daughter Ondine, who was delicate and chilly in London in 1841, has the same solicitous, journeying fancy as was expressed by two other women, both also Frenchwomen, and both articulate in tenderness. Eugénie de Guérin, that queen of sisters, had preceded her with her own complaint, "I have a pain in my brother's side"; and in another age Mme. de Sévigné had suffered, in the course of long posts and through infrequent letters—a protraction of conjectured pain—within the frame of her absent daughter. She phrased her plight in much the same words, confessing the uncancelled union with her child that had effaced for her the boundaries of her personal life.

Is not what we call a life—the personal