"Some had only the wealth of the position; others, without fortune, had the wit and birth.

I must admit that we have done well to wait till God granted us an opportunity to meet one in whom we find the noble blood, the mind, and fortune of a Duchesse d'Herouville." "My dear Modeste," said Helene d'Herouville, leading her new friend apart, "there are a thousand barons in the kingdom, just as there are a hundred poets in Paris, who are worth as much as he; he is so little of a great man that even I, a poor girl forced to take the veil for want of a 'dot,' I would not take him.

You don't know what a young man is who has been for ten years in the hands of a Duchesse de Chaulieu.

None but an old woman of sixty could put up with the little ailments of which, they say, the great poet is always complaining,--a habit in Louis XIV.
that became a perfectly insupportable annoyance.

It is true the duchess does not suffer from it as much as a wife, who would have him always about her." Then, practising a well-known manoeuvre peculiar to her sex, Helene d'Herouville repeated in a low voice all the calumnies which women jealous of the Duchesse de Chaulieu were in the habit of spreading about the poet.