The first is, that he will have the goodness to give me a pious and methodical successor, sound and firm against Jansenism, which is in prodigious credit on this frontier.

The other favor is, that he will have the goodness to complete with my successor that which could not be completed with me on behalf of the gentlemen of St.Sulpice.

I wish his Majesty a long life, of which the church as well as the state has infinite need.
If peradventure I go into the presence of God, I shall often ask these favors of Him." How dread is the power of sovereign majesty, operative even at the death-bed of the greatest and noblest spirits, causing Fenelon in his dying hour to be anxious about the good graces of a monarch ere long, like him, a-dying ! Our thoughts may well linger over those three great minds, Pascal, Bossuet, and Fenelon,--one layman and two bishops; all equally absorbed by the great problems of human life and immortality.

With different degrees of greatness and fruitfulness, they all serve the same cause.
Whether as defenders or assailants of Jansenism and Quietism, the solitary philosopher or the prelates engaged in the court or in the guidance of men, all three of them serving God on behalf of the soul's highest interests, remained unique in their generation, and without successors as they had been without predecessors.
Leaving the desert and the church, and once more entering the world, we immediately encounter, amongst women, one, and one only, in the first rank--Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marchioness of Sevigne, born at Paris on the 5th of February, 1627, five months before Bossuet.

Like a considerable number of women in Italy in the sixteenth century, and in France in the seventeenth, she had received a careful education.