Note 350 — SELECTIONS FROM VARIOUS LETTERS.[331]

Paulina de Grignan, born in 1674, and married in 1695, to the Marquis de Simiane, was noticed at five or six years of age, for the agreeableness of her wit, as well as the beauty of her person. Her letters were already looked upon as performances in which the pleasing and the natural were equally combined. She had scarcely entered her fourth year, when she would occasionally utter repartees full of wit and pleasantry. She was not more than thirteen when she wrote, at Madame de Grignan’s request, a small piece of devotion which the brightest genius might have been proud of. It is easy to guess how a person thus favored by nature must turn out, educated under the eyes of a mother and grandmother whose good sense seemed as it were transfused into her. She excelled not only in the epistolary style, but also in the poetic, though she never wrote but for amusement. The solid principles of true religion, in which she was brought up, shone forth in her, amid the bustle of courts and secular affairs; and never with so much splendor as in the last year of her life, which she employed wholly in the exercise of the most sublime virtues of Christianity.