Cardinal de Noailles is certainly a virtuous cardinal of great merit,
which all cardinals are not. We have four here, each different. Three
have this in common, that they are all as false as gibbet-wood, but
in face and temper they are quite different. Cardinal de Polignac is
well-bred; he has capacity; he is insinuating, his voice is soft;
he is too much given to politics and sycophancy, which makes him
commit the faults for which people blame him. Cardinal de Rohan has
a fine face, like his mother [Mme. de Soubise, one of Louis XIV.'s
mistresses], but he has no figure; he is vain as a peacock, full
of whims, intriguing, a slave to the Jesuits; he thinks he governs
everything, but really governs nothing; he believes that he is
without an equal in this world. Cardinal de Bissy is ugly; he has the
face of a clumsy peasant; he is proud, malignant, and false; more
dissimulating than any one imagines; a sickening flatterer, you see
his falseness in his eyes; he has capacity, but uses it only to do
harm. These three cardinals could put the Noailles in a sack and sell
him without his knowing it, as the proverb says; they are all three
far more shrewd than he. Bissy and Tartuffe are as like as two drops
of water; Bissy has just Tartuffe's manners.
Wolves are going about in bands of eight and ten and attacking
travellers; the extreme severity of the cold is the reason of this;
it is causing great misfortunes. In Paris eight poor washerwomen were
at work on a boat; the ice cut the rope like a razor; the boat was
crushed into bits; one of the women had the presence of mind to jump
from one cake of ice to another, and they had time to throw her a rope
and save her; but all the others perished. The head of one was cut off
by the ice, and the body of another was cut through; that was an awful
thing, and what made it more terrible was that the woman was pregnant,
and when the ice cut her open the head of a child appeared. What can
be imagined more dreadful than that!