_Her Genius--Her Youth--Her unworthy Husband--Her impertinent Cousin--Her
love for her Daughter--Her Letters--Hotel de Carnavalet--Mme. Duiplessis
Guenegaud--Mme. de Coulanges--The Curtain Falls_
Among the brilliant French women of the seventeenth century, no one is
so well-known today as Mme. de Sevigne. She has not only been sung by
poets and portrayed by historians, but she has left us a complete record
of her own life and her own character. Her letters reflect every shade
of her many-sided nature, as well as the events, even the trifling
incidents, of the world in which she lived; the lineaments, the
experiences, the virtues, and the follies of the people whom she
knew. We catch the changeful tints of her mind that readily takes the
complexion of those about her, while retaining its independence; we are
made familiar with her small joys and sorrows, we laugh with her at her
own harmless weaknesses, we feel the inspiration of her sympathy,
we hear the innermost throbbings of her heart. No one was ever less
consciously a woman of letters. No one would have been more surprised
than herself at her own fame. One is instinctively sure that she would
never have seated herself deliberately to write a book of any sort
whatever. While she was planning a form for her thoughts, they would
have flown. She was essentially a woman of the great world, for which
she was fitted by her position, her temperament, her esprit, her tastes,
and her character. She loved its variety, its movement, its gaiety;
she judged leniently even its faults and its frailties. If they often
furnished a target for her wit, behind her sharpest epigrams one detects
an indulgent smile.
The natural outlet for her full mind and heart was in conversation.
When she was alone, they found vent in conversation of another sort. She
talks on paper. Her letters have the unstudied freedom, the rapidity,
the shades, the inflections of spoken words. She gives her thoughts
their own course, "with reins upon the neck," as she was fond of saying,
and without knowing where they will lead her. But it is the personal
element that inspires her. Let her heart be piqued, or touched by a
profound affection, and her mind is illuminated; her pen flies.
Her nature unveils itself, her emotions chase one another in quick
succession, her thoughts crystallize with wonderful brilliancy, and the
world is reflected in a thousand varying colors. The sparkling wit,
the swift judgment, the subtle insight, the lightness of touch, the
indefinable charm of style--these belong to her temperament and her
genius. But the clearness, the justness of expression, the precision,
the simplicity that was never banal--such qualities nature does
not bestow. One must find their source in careful training, in wise
criticism, in early familiarity with good models.
Living from 1626 to 1696, Mme. de Sevigne was en rapport with the best
life of the great century of French letters. She was the granddaughter
of the mystical Mme. de Chantal, who was too much occupied with her
convents and her devotions to give much attention to the little Marie,
left an orphan at the age of six years. The child did not inherit much
of her grandmother's spirit of reverence, and at a later period was wont
to indulge in many harmless pleasantries about her pious ancestress and
"our grandfather, St. Francois de Sales." Deprived so early of the
care of a mother, she was brought up by an uncle, the good Abbe de
Coulanges--the "Bien-Bon"--whose life was devoted to her interests.
Though born in the Place Royale, that long-faded center of so much that
was brilliant and fascinating two centuries ago, much of her youth was
passed in the family chateau at Livry, where she was carefully educated
in a far more solid fashion than was usual among the women of her time.
She had an early introduction to the Hotel de Rambouillet, and readily
caught its intellectual tastes, though she always retained a certain
bold freedom of speech and manners, quite opposed to its spirit.
Her instructors were Chapelain and Menage, both honored habitues of that
famous salon. The first was a dull poet, a profound scholar, somewhat of
a pedant, and notoriously careless in his dress--le vieux Chapelain,
his irreverent pupil used to call him. When he died of apoplexy, years
afterwards, she wrote to her daughter: "He confesses by pressing the
hand; he is like a statue in his chair. So God confounds the pride of
philosophers." But he taught her Latin, Spanish, and Italian, made her
familiar with the beauties of Virgil and Tasso, and gave her a critical
taste for letters.
Menage was younger, and aspired to be a man of the world as well as a
savant. Repeating one day the remark of a friend, that out of ten things
he knew he had learned nine in conversation, he added, "I could say
about the same thing myself"--a confession that savors more of the
salon than of the library. He had a good deal of learning, but much
pretension, and Moliere has given him an undesirable immortality as
Vadius in "Les Femmes Savantes," in company with his deadly enemy, the
Abbe Cotin, who figures as "Trissotin." It appears that the susceptible
savant lost his heart to his lively pupil, and sighed not only in secret
but quite openly. He wrote her bad verses in several languages, loaded
her with eulogies, and followed her persistently. "The name of Mme.
de Sevigne," said the Bishop of Laon, "is in the works of Menage what
Bassan's dog is in his portraits. He cannot help putting it there." She
treated him in a sisterly fashion that put to flight all sentimental
illusions, but she had often to pacify his wounded vanity. One day, in
the presence of several friends, she gave him a greeting rather more
cordial than dignified. Noticing the looks of surprise, she turned away
laughing and said, "So they kissed in the primitive church." But the
wide knowledge and scholarly criticism of Menage were of great value to
the versatile woman, who speedily surpassed her master in style if not
in learning. Evidently she appreciated him, since she addressed him in
one of her letters as "friend of all friends, the best."
At eighteen the gay and unconventional Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was
married to the Marquis de Sevigne; but her period of happiness was a
short one. The husband, who was rich, handsome, and agreeable, proved
weak and faithless. He was one of the temporary caprices of the
dangerous Ninon, led a dashing, irresponsible life, spent his fortune
recklessly, and left his pretty young wife to weep alone at a convenient
distance, under the somber skies of Brittany. Fortunately for her and
for posterity, his career was rapid and brief. For some trifling affair
of so-called honor--a quality of which, from our point of view, he
does not seem to have possessed enough to be worth the trouble of
defending--he had the kindness to get himself killed in a duel, after
seven years of marriage. His spirited wife had loved him sincerely, and
first illusions die slowly. She shed many bitter and natural tears, but
she never showed any disposition to repeat the experiment. Perhaps she
was of the opinion of another young widow who thought it "a fine thing
to bear the name of a man who can commit no more follies." But it is
useless to speculate upon the reasons why a woman does or does not
marry. It is certain that the love of her two children filled the heart
of Mme. de Sevigne; her future life was devoted to their training, and
to repairing a fortune upon which her husband's extravagance had made
heavy inroads.
But the fascinating widow of twenty-five had a dangerous path to
tread. That she lived in a society so lax and corrupt, unprotected and
surrounded by distinguished admirers, without a shadow of suspicion
having fallen upon her fair reputation is a strong proof of her good
judgment and her discretion. She was not a great beauty, though the
flattering verses of her poet friends might lead one to think so. A
complexion fresh and fair, eyes of remarkable brilliancy, an abundance
of blond hair, a face mobile and animated, and a fine figure--these were
her visible attractions. She danced well, sang well, talked well, and
had abounding health. Mme. de La Fayette made a pen-portrait of her,
which was thought to be strikingly true. It was in the form of a letter
from an unknown man. A few extracts will serve to bring her more vividly
before us.
"Your mind so adorns and embellishes your person, that there is no one
in the world so fascinating when you are animated by a conversation from
which constraint is banished. All that you say has such a charm, and
becomes you so well, that the words attract the Smiles and the Graces
around you; the brilliancy of your intellect gives such luster to your
complexion and your eyes, that although it seems that wit should touch
only the ears, yours dazzles the sight.
"Your soul is great and elevated. You are sensitive to glory and to
ambition, and not less so to pleasures; you were born for them and they
seem to have been made for you... In a word, joy is the true state of
your soul, and grief is as contrary to it as possible. You are naturally
tender and impassioned; there was never a heart so generous, so noble,
so faithful... You are the most courteous and amiable person that ever
lived, and the sweet, frank air which is seen in all your actions makes
the simplest compliments of politeness seem from your lips protestations
of friendship."
Mlle. de Scudery sketches her as the Princesse Clarinte in "Clelie,"
concluding with these words: "I have never seen together so many
attractions, so much gaiety, so much coquetry, so much light, so much
innocence and virtue. No one ever understood better the art of having
grace without affectation, raillery without malice, gaiety without
folly, propriety without constraint, and virtue without severity."
Her malicious cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, who was piqued by her indifference,
and basely wished to avenge himself, said that her "warmth was in
her intellect;" that for a woman of quality she was too badine, too
economical, too keenly alive to her own interests; that she made
too much account of a few trifling words from the queen, and was too
evidently flattered when the king danced with her. This opinion of a
vain and jealous man is not entitled to great consideration, especially
when we recall that he had already spoken of her as "the delight of
mankind," and said that antiquity would have dressed altars for her
and she would "surely have been goddess of something." The most
incomprehensible page in her history is her complaisance towards the
persistent impertinences of this perfidious friend. The only solution of
it seems to lie in the strength of family ties, and in her unwillingness
to be on bad terms with one of her very few near relatives.
Bussy-Rabutin was handsome, witty, brilliant, a bel esprit, a member of
the Academie Francaise, and very much in love with his charming cousin,
who clearly appreciated his talents, if not his character. "You are the
fagot of my intellect," she says to him; but she forbids him to talk
of love. Unfortunately for himself, his vanity got the better of his
discretion. He wrote the "Histoire Amoureuse des Gauls," and raised such
a storm about his head by his attack upon many fair reputations, that,
after a few months of lonely meditation in the Bastille, he was exiled
from Paris for seventeen years. Long afterwards he repented the
unkind blow he had given to Mme. de Sevigne, confessed its injustice,
apologized, and made his peace. But the world is less forgiving, and
wastes little sympathy upon the base but clever and ambitious man who
was doomed to wear his restless life away in the uncongenial solitude of
his chateau.
Among the numerous adorers of Mme. de Sevigne were the Prince de Conti,
the witty Comte de Lude, the poet Segrais, Fouquet, and Turenne. Her
friendship for the last two seems to have been the most lively and
permanent. We owe to her sympathetic pen the best account of the death
of Turenne. Her devotion to the interests of Fouquet and his family
lasted though the many years of imprisonment that ended only with his
life. There was nothing of the spirit of the courtier in her generous
affection for the friends who were out of favor. The loyalty of her
character was notably displayed in her unwavering attachment to Cardinal
de Retz, during his long period of exile and misfortune, after the
Fronde.
But one must go outside the ordinary channels to find the veritable
romance of Mme. de Sevigne's life. Her sensibility lent itself with
great facility to impressions, and her gracious manners, her amiable
character, her inexhaustible fund of gaiety could not fail to bring her
a host of admirers. She had doubtless a vein of harmless coquetry, but
it was little more than the natural and variable grace of a frank and
sympathetic woman who likes to please, and who scatters about her the
flowers of a rich mind and heart, without taking violent passions too
seriously, if, indeed, she heeds them at all. Friendship, too, has
its shades, its subtleties, its half-perceptible and quite unconscious
coquetries. But the supreme passion of Mme. de Sevigne was her love
for her daughter. It was the exaltation of her mystical grandmother,
in another form. "To love as I love you makes all other friendships
frivolous," she writes. Whatever her gifts and attractions may have
been, she is known to the world mainly through this affection and the
letters which have immortalized it. Nowhere in literature has maternal
love found such complete and perfect expression. Nowhere do we find
a character so clearly self-revealed. Others have professed to unveil
their innermost lives, but there is always a suspicion of posing
in deliberate revelations. Mme. De Sevigne has portrayed herself
unconsciously. It is the experience of yesterday, the thought of today,
the hope of tomorrow, the love that is at once the joy and sorrow of all
the days, that are woven into a thousand varying but living forms. One
naturally seeks in the character of the daughter a key to the absorbing
sentiment which is the inspiration and soul of these letters; but one
does not find it there. More beautiful than her mother, more learned,
more accomplished, she lacked her sympathetic charm. Cold, reserved,
timid, and haughty, without vivacity and apparently without fine
sensibility, she was much admired but little loved by the world in which
she lived. "When you choose, you are adorable," wrote her mother; but
evidently she did not always so choose. Bussy-Rabutin says of her, "This
woman has esprit, but it is esprit soured and of insupportable egotism.
She will make as many enemies as her mother makes friends and adorers."
He did not like her, and one must again take his opinion with
reserve; but she says of herself that she is "of a temperament little
communicative." In her mature life she naively writes: "At first people
thought me amiable enough, but when they knew me better they loved me no
more." "The prettiest girl in France," whose beauty was expected to "set
the world on fire," created a mild sensation at court; was noticed by
the king, who danced with her, received her share of adulation, and
finally became the third wife of the Comte de Grignan, who carried her
off to Provence, to the lasting grief of her adoring mother, and to
the great advantage of posterity, which owes to this fact the series of
incomparable letters that made the fame of their writer, and threw so
direct and vivid a light upon an entire generation.
The world has been inclined to regard the son of Mme. de Sevigne as the
more lovable of her two children, but she doubtless recognized in his
light and inconsequent character many of the qualities of her husband
which had given her so much sorrow during the brief years of her
marriage. Amiable, affectionate, and not without talent, he was
nevertheless the source of many anxieties and little pride. He followed
in the footsteps of his father, and became a willing victim to the
fascinations of Ninon; he frequented the society of Champmesle, where he
met habitually Boileau and Racine. He recited well, had a fine literary
taste, much sensibility, and a gracious ease of manner that made him
many friends. "He was almost as much loved as I am," remarked the
brilliant Mme. de Coulanges, after accompanying him on a visit to
Versailles. He appealed to Mme. de La Fayette to use her influence with
his mother to induce her to pay his numerous debts. There is a touch of
satire in the closing line of the note in which she intercedes for him.
"The great friendship you have for Mme. de Grignan," she writes, "makes
it necessary to show some for her brother."--But we have glimpses of his
weakness and instability in many of his mother's intimate letters. In
the end, however, having exhausted the pleasures of life and felt the
bitterness of its disappointments, he took refuge in devotion, and died
in the odor of sanctity, after the example of his devout ancestress.
Mme. de Grignan certainly offered a more solid foundation for her
mother's confidence and affection. It is quite possible, too, that her
reserve concealed graces of character only apparent on a close intimacy.
But love does not wait for reasons, and this one had all the shades and
intensities of a passion, with few of its exactions. D'Andilly called
the mother a "pretty pagan," because she made such an idol of her
daughter. She sometimes has her own misgivings on the score of
religion. "I make this a little Trappe," she wrote from Livry, after the
separation. "I wish to pray to God and make a thousand reflections; but,
Ma pauvre chere, what I do better than all that is to think of you. ..
I see you, you are present to me, I think and think again of everything;
my head and my mind are racked; but I turn in vain, I seek in vain; the
dear child whom I love with so much passion is two hundred leagues away.
I have her no more. Then I weep without the power to help myself."
She rings the changes upon this inexhaustible theme. A responsive word
delights her; a brief silence terrifies her; a slight coldness plunges
her into despair. "I have an imagination so lively that uncertainty
makes me die," she writes. If a shadow of grief touches her idol, her
sympathies are overflowing. "You weep, my very dear child; it is an
affair for you; it is not the same thing for me, it is my temperament."
But though this love pulses and throbs behind all her letters, it does
not make up the substance of them. To amuse her daughter she gathers all
the gossip of the court, all the news of her friends; she keeps her au
courant with the most trifling as well as the most important events. Now
she entertains her with a witty description of a scene at Versailles, a
tragical adventure, a gracious word about Mme. Scarron, "who sups with
me every evening," a tender message from Mme. de La Fayette; now it is a
serious reflection upon the death of Turenne, a vivid picture of her own
life, a bit of philosophy, a spicy anecdote about a dying man who takes
forty cups of tea every morning, and is cured. A few touches lay bare a
character or sketch a vivid scene. It is this infinite variety of detail
that gives such historic value to her letters. In a correspondence so
intimate she has no interest to conciliate, no ends to gain. She is
simply a mirror in which the world about her is reflected.
But the most interesting thing we read in her letters is the life
and nature of the woman herself. She has a taste for society and for
seclusion, for gaiety and for thought, for friendship and for books. For
the moment each one seems dominant. "I am always of the opinion of the
one heard last," she says, laughing at her own impressibility. It is an
amiable admission, but she has very fine and rational ideas of her own,
notwithstanding. In books, for which she had always a passion, she
found unfailing consolation. Corneille and La Fontaine were her favorite
traveling companions. "I am well satisfied to be a substance that
thinks and reads," she says, finding her good uncle a trifle dull for
a compagnon de voyage. Her tastes were catholic. She read Astree with
delight, loved Petrarch, Ariosto, and Montaigne; Rabelais made her "die
of laughter," she found Plutarch admirable, enjoyed Tacitus as keenly as
did Mme. Roland a century later, read Josephus and Lucian, dipped into
the history of the crusades and of the iconoclasts, of the holy fathers
and of the saints. She preferred the history of France to that of Rome
because she had "neither relatives nor friends in the latter place."
She finds the music of Lulli celestial and the preaching of Bourdaloue
divine. Racine she did not quite appreciate. In his youth, she said he
wrote tragedies for Champmesle and not for posterity. Later she modified
her opinion, but Corneille held always the first place in her affection.
She had a great love for books on morals, read and reread the essays
of Nicole, which she found a perpetual resource against the ills of
life--even rain and bad weather. St. Augustine she reads with pleasure,
and she is charmed with Bossuet and Pascal; but she is not very devout,
though she often tries to be. There is a serious naivete in all her
efforts in this direction. She seems to have always one eye upon the
world while she prays, and she mourns over her own lack of devotion.
"I wish my heart were for God as it is for you," she writes to her
daughter. "I am neither of God nor of the devil," she says again; "that
state troubles me though, between ourselves, I find it the most natural
in the world." Her reason quickly pierces to the heart of superstition;
sometimes she cannot help a touch of sarcasm. "I fear that this trappe,
which wishes to pass humanity, may become a lunatic asylum," she says.
She believes little in saints and processions. Over the high altar of
her chapel she writes SOLI DEO HONOR ET GLORIA. "It is the way to make
no one jealous," she remarks.
She was rather inclined toward Jansenism, but she could not fathom all
the subtleties of her friends the Port Royalists, and begged them to
"have the kindness, out of pity for her, to thicken their religion a
little as it evaporated in so much reasoning." As she grows older the
tone of seriousness is more perceptible. "If I could only live two
hundred years," she writes, "it seems to me that I might be an admirable
person." The rationalistic tendencies of Mme. de Grignan give her some
anxiety, and she rallies her often upon the doubtful philosophy of her
PERE DESCARTES. She could not admit a theory which pretended to
prove that her dog Marphise had no soul, and she insisted that if the
Cartesians had any desire to go to heaven, it was out of curiosity.
"Talk to the Cardinal (de Retz) a little of your MACHINES; machines
that love, machines that have a choice for some one, machines that are
jealous, machines that fear. ALLEZ, ALLEZ, you are jesting! Descartes
never intended to make us believe all that."
In her youth Mme. de Sevigne did not like the country because it was
windy and spoiled her beautiful complexion; perhaps, too, because it
was lonely. But with her happy gift of adaptation she came to love
its tranquillity. She went often to the solitary old family chateau in
Brittany to make economies and to retrieve the fortune which suffered
successively from the reckless extravagance of her husband and son,
and from the expensive tastes of the Comte de Grignan, who was acting
governor of Provence, and lived in a state much too magnificent for
his resources. Of her life at The Rocks she has left us many exquisite
pictures. "I go out into the pleasant avenues; I have a footman who
follows me; I have books, I change place, I vary the direction of my
promenade; a book of devotion, a book of history; one changes from one
to the other; that gives diversion; one dreams a little of God, of his
providence; one possesses one's soul, one thinks of the future."
She embellishes her park, superintends the planting of trees, and "a
labyrinth from which one could not extricate one's self without the
thread of Ariadne;" she fills her garden with orange trees and jessamine
until the air is so perfumed that she imagines herself in Provence. She
sits in the shade and embroiders while her son "reads trifles, comedies
which he plays like Moliere, verses, romances, tales; he is very
amusing, he has esprit, he is appreciative, he entertains us." She notes
the changing color of the leaves, the budding of the springtime. "It
seems to me that in case of need I should know very well how to make a
spring," she writes. She loves too the "fine, crystal days of autumn."
Sometimes, in the evening, she has "gray-brown thoughts which grow black
at night," but she never dwells upon these. Her "habitual thought--that
which one must have for God, if one does his duty"--is for her daughter.
"My dear child," she writes, "it is only you that I prefer to the
tranquil repose I enjoy here."
If her own soul is open to us in all its variable and charming moods, we
also catch in her letters many unconscious reflections of her daughter's
character. She offers her a little needed worldly advice. "Try, my
child," she says, "to adjust yourself to the manners and customs of the
people with whom you live; adapt yourself to that which is not bad; do
not be disgusted with that which is only mediocre; make a pleasure
of that which is not ridiculous." She entreats her to love the little
Pauline and not to scold her, nor send her away to the convent as she
did her sister Marie-Blanche. With what infinite tenderness she always
speaks of this child, smiling at her small outbursts of temper, soothing
her little griefs, and giving wise counsels about her education.
Evidently she doubted the patience of the mother. "You do not yet too
well comprehend maternal love," she writes; "so much the better, my
child; it is violent."
Unfortunately this adoring mother could not get on very well with her
daughter when they were together. She drowned her with affection, she
fatigued her with care for her health, she was hurt by her ungracious
manner, she was frozen by her indifference in short, they killed each
other. It is not a rare thing to make a cult of a distant idol, and to
find one's self unequal to the perpetual shock of the small collisions
which diversities of taste and temperament render inevitable in daily
intercourse. In this instance, one can readily imagine that a love
so interwoven with every fiber of the mother's life, must have been a
little over-sensitive, a little exacting, a trifle too demonstrative for
the colder nature of the daughter; but that it was the less genuine and
profound, no one who has at all studied the character of Mme. de Sevigne
can for a moment imagine. How she suffers when it becomes necessary for
Mme. de Grignan to go back to Provence! How the tears flow! How readily
she forgives all, even to denying that there is anything to forgive. "A
word, a sweetness, a return, a caress, a tenderness, disarms me, cures
me in a moment," she writes. And again: "Would to God, my daughter,
that I might see you once more at the Hotel de Carnavalet, not for eight
days, nor to make there a penitence, but to embrace you and to make you
see clearly that I cannot be happy without you, and that the chagrins
which my friendship for you might give me are more agreeable than
all the false peace of a wearisome absence." In spite of these little
clouds, the old love is never dimmed; we are constantly bewildered with
the inexhaustible riches of a heart which gives so lavishly and really
asks so little for itself.
The Hotel de Carnavalet was one of the social centers of the latter part
of the century, but it was the source of no special literature and of no
new diversions. Mme. de Sevigne was herself luminous, and her fame
owes none of its luster to the reflection from those about her. She was
original and spontaneous. She read because she liked to read, and not
because she wished to be learned. She wrote as she talked, from the
impulse of the moment, without method or aim excepting to follow where
her rapid thought led her. Her taste for society was of the same order.
Her variable and sparkling genius would have broken loose from the
formal conversations and rather studied brilliancy that had charmed her
youth at the Hotel de Rambouillet. The onerous duties of a perpetual
hostess would not have suited her temperament, which demanded its hours
of solitude and repose. But she was devoted to her friends, and there
was a delightful freedom in all her intercourse with them. She has not
chronicled her salon, but she has chronicled her world, and we gather
from her letters the quality of her guests. She liked to pass an evening
in the literary coterie at the Luxembourg; to drop in familiarly upon
Mme. de La Fayette, where she found La Rochefoucauld, Cardinal de Retz,
sometimes Segrais, Huet, La Fontaine, Moliere, and other wits of the
time; to sup with Mme. de Coulanges and Mme. Scarron. She is a constant
visitor at the old Hotel de Nevers, where Marie de Gonzague and the
Princesse Palatine had charmed an earlier generation, and where Mme.
Duplessis Guenegaud, a woman of brilliant intellect, heroic courage,
large heart, and pure character, whom d'Andilly calls one of the great
souls, presided over a new circle of young poets and men of letters,
reviving the fading memories of the Hotel de Rambouillet. Mme. De
Sevigne, who had fine dramatic talent, acted here in little comedies.
She heard Boileau read his satires and Racine his tragedies. She met the
witty Chevalier de Chatillon, who asked eight days to make an impromptu,
and Pomponne, who wrote to his father that the great world he found
in this salon did not prevent him from appearing in a gray habit. In a
letter from the country house of Mme. Duplessis, at Fresnes, to the same
Pomponne, then ambassador to Sweden, Mme. de Sevigne says: "I have M.
d'Andilly at my left, that is, on the side of my heart; I have Mme.
de La Fayette at my right; Mme. Duplessis before me, daubing little
pictures; Mme. De Motteville a little further off, who dreams
profoundly; our uncle de Cessac, whom I fear because I do not know him
very well."
It is this life of charming informality; this society of lettered
tastes, of wit, of talent, of distinction, that she transfers to her
own salon. Its continuity is often broken by her long absences in the
country or in Provence, but her irresistible magnetism quickly draws the
world around her, on her return. In addition to her intimate friends
and to men of letters like Racine, Boileau, Benserade, one meets
representatives of the most distinguished of the old families of France.
Conde, Richelieu, Colberg, Louvois, and Sully are a few among the great
names, of which the list might be indefinitely extended. We have many
interesting glimpses of the Grande Mademoiselle, the "adorable" Duchesse
de Chaulnes, the Duc and Duchesse de Rohan, who were "Germans in the
art of savoir-vivre," the Abbess de Fontevrault, so celebrated for her
esprit and her virtue, and a host of others too numerous to mention. The
sculptured portals and time-stained walls of the Hotel de Carnavalet are
still alive with the memories of these brilliant reunions and the famous
people who shone there two hundred years ago.
Among those who exercised the most important influence upon the life
of Mme. de Sevigne was Corbinelli, the wise counselor, who, with a
soul untouched by the storms of adversity through which he had passed,
devoted his life to letters and the interests of his friends. No one had
a finer appreciation of her gifts and her character. Her compared her
letters to those of Cicero, but he always sought to temper her ardor,
and to turn her thoughts toward an elevated Christian philosophy.
"In him," said Mme. de Sevigne, "I defend one who does not cease to
celebrate the perfections and the existence of God; who never judges his
neighbor, who excuses him always; who is insensible to the pleasures and
delights of life, and entirely submissive to the will of Providence;
in fine, I sustain the faithful admirer of Sainte Therese, and of my
grandmother, Sainte Chantal." This gentle, learned, and disinterested
man, whose friendship deepened with years, was an unfailing resource. In
her troubles and perplexities she seeks his advice; in her intellectual
tastes she is sustained by his sympathy. She speaks often of the happy
days in Provence, when, together with her daughter, they translate
Tacitus, read Tasso, and get entangled in endless discussions upon
Descartes. Even Mme. de Grignan, who rarely likes her mother's friends,
in the end gives due consideration to this loyal confidant, though
she does not hesitate to ridicule the mysticism into which he finally
drifted.
After Mme. de La Fayette, the woman whose relations with Mme. de Sevigne
were the most intimate was Mme. de Coulanges, who merits here more than
a passing word. Her wit was proverbial, her popularity universal. The
Leaf, the Fly, the Sylph, the Goddess, her friend calls her in turn,
with many a light thrust at her volatile but loyal character. This
brilliant, spirituelle, caustic woman was the wife of a cousin of the
Marquis de Sevigne, who was as witty as herself and more inconsequent.
Both were amiable, both sparkled with bons mots and epigrams, but they
failed to entertain each other. The husband goes to Italy or Germany or
passes his time in various chateaux, where he is sure of a warm welcome
and good cheer. The wife goes to Versailles, visits her cousin Louvois,
the Duchesse de Richelieu, and Mme. de Maintenon, who loves her much; or
presides at home over a salon that is always well filled. "Ah, Madame,"
said M. de Barillon, "how much your house pleases me! I shall come here
very evening when I am tired of my family." "Monsieur," she replied, "I
expect you tomorrow." When she was ill and likely to die, her husband
had a sudden access of affection, and nursed her with great tenderness.
Mme. de Coulanges dying and her husband in grief, seemed somehow out
of the order of things. "A dead vivacity, a weeping gaiety, these are
prodigies," wrote Mme. de Sevigne. When the wife recovered, however,
they took their separate ways as before.
"Your letters are delicious," she wrote once to Mme. de Sevigne, "and
you are as delicious as your letters." Her own were as much sought in
her time, but she had no profound affection to consecrate them and no
children to collect them, so that only a few have been preserved. There
is a curious vein of philosophy in one she wrote to her husband, when
the pleasures of life began to fade. "As for myself, I care little for
the world; I find it no longer suited to my age; I have no engagements,
thank God, to retain me there. I have seen all there is to see. I have
only an old face to present to it, nothing new to show nor to discover
there. Ah! What avails it to recommence every day the visits, to trouble
one's self always about things that do not concern us? .... My dear sir,
we must think of something more solid." She disappears from the scene
shortly after the death of Mme. De Sevigne. Long years of silence and
seclusion, and another generation heard one day that she had lived and
that she was dead.
The friends of Mme. de Sevigne slip away one after another; La
Rochefoucauld, De Retz, Mme. de La Fayette are gone. "Alas!" she writes,
"how this death goes running about and striking on all sides." The
thought troubles her. "I am embarked in life without my consent," she
says; "I must go out of it--that overwhelms me. And how shall I go?
Whence: By what door? When will it be? In what disposition: How shall
I be with God? What have I to present to him? What can I hope?--Am I
worthy of paradise? Am I worthy of hell? What an alternative! What a
complication! I would like better to have died in the arms of my nurse."
The end came to her in the one spot where she would most have wished
it. She died while on a visit to her daughter in Provence. Strength
and resignation came with the moment, and she faced with calmness
and courage the final mystery. To the last she retained her wit, her
vivacity, and that eternal youth of the spirit which is one of the
rarest of God's gifts to man. "There are no more friends left to me,"
said Mme. de Coulanges; and later she wrote to Mme. de Grignan, "The
grief of seeing her no longer is always fresh to me. I miss too many
things at the Hotel de Carnavalet."
The curtain falls upon this little world which the magical pen of Mme.
de Sevigne has made us know so well. The familiar faces retreat into the
darkness, to be seen no more. But the picture lives, and the woman who
has outlined it so clearly, and colored it so vividly and so tenderly,
smiles upon us still, out of the shadows of the past, crowned with the
white radiance of immortal genius and immortal love.