Swetchine, MADAME (née Soymanof), was born at Moscow in 1782, joined the Roman
Catholie communion under the influence of Joseph de Maistre in November 1815, and settled in France about the end of 1816, dying at Paris in 1857. For about forty years she maintained at Paris a famous salon, characterised by the remarkable peculiarity of a distinctly theological bias. Her husband, General Swetchine, was a quiet, inoffensive man, twenty-five years her senior; she herself was small and plain, with a Calmuck nose and ill-matched eyes; yet she possessed a spiritual beauty and a charm of personality of altogether unusual kind. Her passionate nature had early found safety and perhaps happiness in rigidity of principle and an austere love of heaven; she never had a child; and almost from youth until the end her life was marked with more than the enthusiasm of the convert. Yet she tempered the ardour of zealous and propagandist orthodoxy with all the courtesy of the great world. The church had granted her the rare indulgence of a private chapel in her house, and from the dialectic play of intellect in the salon she passed easily to rapt worship and spiritual communion with God. Her letters and writings, such as those on Old Age and Resignation, show subtle thought and elevation of tone, if scarcely distinction of style, but lack the peculiar charm that belonged to her personality, and scarcely justify the enthusiasm of her group of friends whose admiration soon passed into worship.
See M. de Faloux, Madame Swetchine, sa Vie et ses Œuvres (2 vols. 1860), and her Lettres, by the same editor (2 vols. 1861); also Sainte-Beuve, in Nouveaux Lundis, vol. i., and E. Scherer, in Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine, vol. i.