LIVRI, Wednesday, October 25, 1679.
I am here alone; I was loath to suffer any irksomeness but my own.
No company tempts me to begin my winter so soon. If I chose it, I
could assume an air of solitude; but after hearing Madame de Brissac
say, the other day, that she was wholly engaged in her meditations,
and had rather too much of her own company, I am proud to boast that
I have passed this whole afternoon in the meadow, in conference with
our sheep and cows. I have store of good books, especially Montaigne;
what could I desire more, since I can not have you? I have the favor
of your last letter at this place. You fancy I am at Paris, sitting in
the chimney-corner, and have, no doubt, sitting by your own, received
my lamentations on the fatigue of your journey; what a dreadful thing
it is to be at such a distance! It is impossible to be more astonished
than I was to find you with M. and Madame de Mêmes; I fancied you had
been deceived, and that you were to have received them at Livri. They
write to me to express how much they are charmed at the reception
you have given them: they are very desirous to see me, which is the
strongest inducement for my returning so speedily.
You are in the right to suppress Paulina’s modesty; it will be worn
out by the time she is fifteen; a premature and ill-timed modesty may
have sad consequences. You are in jest, to thank Corbinelli for the
compliment he paid your good sense. He merely thinks you superior
to others; and when he says so, he says what he thinks, and has no
intention to flatter you. He would have said a word or two in my
letter, on the compliments you were pleased to make him; but this I
intend to wave till my return. M. and Madame de Rohan have not thought
of making him a present, out of the two thousand five hundred pistoles
they received at the assembly of the States, under the title of the
little prince of Leon. Some people have a strange destiny; Corbinelli’s
seems to be to hold in the most sovereign contempt what other folks
prize in the highest degree. It is true, I was very much amused with
his conversation, and that of the Abbé de Piles;[150] they agreed in
many things, though there were some of harder digestion, which they
seemed to chew upon. M. de Rochefoucault calls this eating hot peas: I
am sure they had a good dish of them; for this forest is adapted for
such things. The fat abbé has entered on his office of gazetteer, so
you need be under no uneasiness about answers; he is better calculated
for the office than I am.
[150] The same, probably, who has made himself known by his works
on painting. He studied in the Sorbonne. He afterward went to
Italy with the younger Amelot, whom he educated. He was also
employed in several negotiations.
Your brother is a strange creature; he could not, for the soul of him,
help spoiling all the wonders he performed at the assembly of the
States, by an absurd fancy and a pretense of being in love perfectly
ridiculous. The object is a Mademoiselle de la Coste, upward of thirty
years of age, without fortune or beauty; even her father says he is
very sorry for it, and that it is by no means a fit match for M. de
Sévigné; he writes me so himself; I commend and thank him for his
prudence. What do you suppose your brother has done since? he has
never quitted his damsel, but has followed her to Rennes and Lower
Brittany, where she has gone under pretense of visiting Tonquedec; he
has almost turned her brain, and has put her out of conceit with a very
proper match she had in some degree contracted; it is the talk of the
whole province. M de Coulanges, and all my friends in Brittany, write
to me about it, and are all persuaded he will certainly marry her.
For my own part, I am convinced of the contrary; but I ask him why
he so unnecessarily disgraces his poor head, after such a promising
commencement? why he makes the lady reject an offer she now looks upon
with the most sovereign contempt? and why this perfidy? If it is not
perfidy, it will have some other name, since I am determined, let what
will happen, never to sign the marriage-contract. If he be really in
love, so much the worse, for this is a source of the most extravagant
actions; but as I think him incapable of that passion, I should
scruple, were I in his place, thus wantonly to wound the repose and the
fortune of one he can so easily dispense with. He is now at the Rocks,
from whence he writes to me about this journey to Tonquedec’s, but not
a syllable of his Dulcinea, or of this noble flame. Only in general
terms, a great many fine things, and compliments without number. In
short, it is an affair I leave entirely to the disposal of Providence.