I can boast the gold and enamelled pincushion of Madame de Maintenon, heart-shaped, and stuck as full of pins as the hearts of the French Protestants were with thorns by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; to which she is said to have so greatly contributed by her counsel to her infatuated lover, Louis the Fourteenth.

I can indulge in a pinch of snuff from the _tabatiere_ of the Marquise de Rambouillet, hold my court-plaster in the _boite a mouches_ of Ninon de l'Enclos, and cut ribands with the scissors of Madame de Deffand.
This desire of obtaining objects that have belonged to celebrated people may be, and often is, considered puerile; but confess to the weakness, and the contemplation of the little memorials I have named awakens recollections in my mind fraught with interest.
I can fancy Madame de Sevigne, who was as amiable as she was clever, and whose tenderness towards her daughter is demonstrated so naturally and touchingly in the letters she addressed to her, holding the _flacon_ now mine to the nostrils of Madame de Grignan, in whose health she was always so much more interested than in her own.
I can see in my mind's eye the precise and demure Madame de Maintenon taking a pin from the very pincushion now before me, to prevent the opening of her kerchief, and so conceal even her throat from the prying eyes of the aged voluptuary, whose passions the wily prude is said to have excited by a concealment of a portion of her person that had, in all probability, ceased to possess charms enough to produce this effect, if revealed.
This extreme reserve on the part of the mature coquette evinced a profound knowledge of mankind, and, above all, of him on whom she practised her arts.

The profuse display of the bust and shoulders in those days, when the ladies of the court left so little to the imagination of the amorous monarch on whose heart so many of them had designs, must have impaired the effect meant to have been achieved by the indelicate exposure; for--hear it ye fair dames, with whose snowy busts and dimpled shoulders the eyes of your male acquaintance are as familiar as with your faces!--the charms of nature, however beautiful, fall short of the ideal perfection accorded to them by the imagination, when unseen.

The clever Maintenon, aware of this fact, of which the less wise of her sex are ignorant or forgetful, afforded a striking contrast in her dress to the women around her, and piquing first the curiosity, and then the passions, of the old libertine, acquired an influence over him when she had long passed the meridian of her personal attractions, which youthful beauties, who left him no room to doubt their charms, or to exaggerate them as imagination is prone to do, could never accomplish.
This very pincushion, with its red velvet heart stuck with pins, was probably a gift from the enamoured Louis, and meant to be symbolical of the state of his own; which, in hardness, it might be truly said to resemble.

It may have often been placed on her table when Maintenon was paying the penalty of her hard-earned greatness by the painful task of endeavouring--as she acknowledged--to amuse a man who was no longer amusable.
Could it speak, it might relate the wearisome hours passed in a palace (for the demon _Ennui_ cannot be expelled even from the most brilliant; nay, prefers, it is said, to select them for his abode), and we should learn, that while an object of envy to thousands, the mistress, or unacknowledged wife of _le Grand Monarque_, was but little more happy than the widow of Scarron when steeped in poverty.
Madame de Maintenon discovered what hundreds before and since have done--that splendour and greatness cannot confer happiness; and, while trying to amuse a man who, though possessed of sovereign power, has lost all sense of enjoyment, must have reverted, perhaps with a sigh, to the little chamber in which she so long soothed the sick bed of the witty octogenarian, Scarron; who, gay and cheerful to the last, could make her smile by his sprightly and _spirituelles_ sallies, which neither the evils of poverty nor pain could subdue.
Perhaps this pincushion has lain on her table when Madame de Maintenon listened to the animating conversation of Racine, or heard him read aloud, with that spirit and deep pathos for which his reading was so remarkable, his _Esther_ and _Alhalie_, previously to their performance at St.-Cyr.
That she did not make his peace with the king, when he offended him by writing an essay to prove that long wars, however likely to reflect glory on a sovereign, were sure to entail misery on his subjects, shews that either her influence over the mind of Louis was much less powerful than has been believed, or that she was deficient in the feelings that must have prompted her to exert it by pleading for him.
The ungenerous conduct of the king in banishing from his court a man whose genius shed a purer lustre over it than all the battles Boileau has sung, and for a cause that merited praise instead of displeasure, has always appeared to me to be indicative of great meanness as well as hardness of heart; and while lamenting the weakness of Racine, originating in a morbid sensibility that rendered his disgrace at court so painful and humiliating to the poet as to cause his death, I am still less disposed to pardon the sovereign that could thus excite into undue action a sensibility, the effects of which led its victim to the grave.
The diamond-mounted _tabatiere_ now on my table once occupied a place on that of the Marquise de Rambouillet, in that hotel so celebrated, not only for the efforts made by its coterie towards refining the manners and morals of her day, but the language also, until the affectation to which its members carried their notions of purity, exposed them to a ridicule that tended to subvert the influence they had previously exercised over society.
Moliere--the inimitable Moliere--may have been permitted the high distinction of taking a pinch of snuff from it, while planning his _Precieuses Ridicules_, which, _malgre_ his disingenuous disavowal of the satire being aimed at the Hotel Rambouillet, evidently found its subject there.