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.
