51/143 de Montpensier, "my great Mademoiselle," as Madame de Sevigne used to call her, had died at Paris on the 5th of April, 1693, after a violent illness, as feverish as her life. Impassioned and haughty, with her head so full of her greatness that she did not marry in her youth, thinking nobody worthy of her except the king and the emperor, who had no fancy for her, and ending by a private marriage with the Duke of Lauzun, "a cadet of Gascony," whom the king would not permit her to espouse publicly; clever, courageous, hare-brained, generous, she has herself sketched her own portrait. "I am tall, neither fat nor thin, of a very fine and easy figure. I have a good mien, arms and hands not beautiful, but a beautiful skin and throat too. |