But I think that my mother found most comfort in the words in which, quite involuntarily, I conveyed to her a little of my own anguish. It could not but make Mamma happy (notwithstanding all her affection for myself), like everything else that guaranteed my grandmother survival in our hearts. Daily after this my mother went down and sat upon the beach, so as to do exactly what her mother had done, and read her mother’s two favourite books, the

Memoirs of Madame de Beausergent and the Letters of Madame de Sévigné. She, like all the rest of us, could not bear to hear the latter lady called the “spirituelle Marquise” any more than to hear La Fontaine called “le Bonhomme.” But when, in reading the Letters , she came upon the words: “My daughter,” she seemed to be listening to her mother’s voice.