MADAME DE SEVIGNE
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.
