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General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1890 Original Publisher: Smith, Elder Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: COMPANY MANNERS. VICTOR COUSIN, the French philosopher, has undertaken a new task within the last few years. Whether as a relaxation from, or a corgjnuati'- jf, his study of metaphysics, I do not know, but he has begun to write the biographies of some of the celebrated French women of the seventeenth century. In making out his list, he is careful to distinguish between authoresses and "femmes d'esprit," ranking the latter infinitely the higher in every point of view. The first of his series is Jacqueline Pascal, the sister of Blaise, known at Port Royal as the Sister Euphemia -- a holy, pure, and sainted woman. The second whom the grave philosopher has chosen as a subject for his biography is that beautiful, splendid sinner of the Fronde, the fair-haired Duchess de Longueville. He draws the pure and perfect outlines of Jacqueline Pascal's character with a severe and correct pencil; he paints the lovely Duchess with the fond, admiring exaggeration of a lover. The wits of Paris, in consequence, have written the following epitaph for him : " Here lies Victor Cousin, the great philosopher, in love with the Duchess de Longueville, who died a century and a half before he was born." Even the friends of this Duchess, insignificant in themselves, become dear and illustrious to Cousin for her fair sake. It is not long since he contributed an article on Madame de Sabl6 to the Revue des Deux Mondes, which has since been publ...