Sévigné, MADAME DE, the queen of letter-writers, and one of the most charming figures in the literature of France, was born at Paris of an ancient Burgundian family, February 6, 1626. Her maiden name was Maric de Rabutin-Chantal, and she was the second and only surviving child of her parents. Her father's mother had entered a convent under the advice of Saint Francis de Sales, became founder of the Order of the Visitation, and was afterwards canonised. When the child was but one year old her father fell fighting against the English at Ré; a few years later her mother followed, leaving her to be brought up at Livry by her maternal uncle, the Abbé de Coulanges, the 'Bienbon' of her life-long affection. She received a careful education under Ménage and Chapelain, and learned Latin, Italian, and Spanish. From her childhood she saw clearly the whole comedy of life, and all her days she was 'une grande dévoreuse de livres'—history, Virgil, Plutarch, Tacitus, Nicole, Montaigne, and even Rabelais. At eighteen (August 4, 1644) she married the young and handsome Marquis Henri de Sévigné, the head of an ancient family of Brittany, but unfortunately for her happiness a spendthrift and a libertine. Her daughter Françoise Marguerite was born at Paris, October 10, 1646; her son, Charles, at her famous country-house, the Rochers, in 1648. She loved her husband in spite of his infidelities and indifference; forgave him even his passion for Ninon de Lençlos, who lived to cast for a moment the same evil spell upon her son; and when he was killed in a duel by a rival in a more sordid intrigue (February 5, 1651), mourned him sincerely, yet forgot him so completely that in the long correspondence of later years with her children she does not once mention his name. Madame de Sévigné at the moment of her widowhood was but twenty-five, brilliant in her beauty and fascination; yet without hesitation she embraced that holy vocation of undivided motherhood to which she was to give such complete and exquisite expression. Her handsome figure, splendid complexion, fair, wavy hair, and brilliant eyes are spoken of by all who have described her; but her beauty was more that of expression than of feature, and she herself has told us that her nose was somewhat square, her blue eyes ill-matched (bigarrés). Her portraits are not satisfactory, and do not give the idea of beauty, but doubtless her charm was of that subtle kind that eludes the painter. After about a year's retirement at the Rochers she returned to society, but all the flatteries of the most brilliant court in the world failed to touch her heart. The Prince de Conti, Turenne, Fouquet the Surintendant of Finance, Rohan, and her cousin Bussy-Rabutin (1618-93) sighed for her in vain; and, stranger still, in the midst of that age of gilded corruption, her name remains without a stain. She was virtuous by temperament, with warmth only in the intellect, says Bussy in his malicious portrait of her; but the intended sneer recoils upon himself, as if it were no virtue for that warm heart and impulsive temperament to be virtuous! Her heart was entirely occupied by a purer love—an intense devotion to her children, and a warmth of friendship almost beyond example. For no one ever had so many and such devoted friends—no woman ever knew like her how to transform a lover into a friend. La Rochefoucauld said she fully satisfied his ideal of friendship, and Madame de la Fayette said, almost at the close, after forty years of friendship without a cloud, 'Croyez, ma très chère, que vous êtes la personne du monde que j'ai le plus véritablement aimée.' The real secret of this affection was her own goodness, which is reflected on every page of her letters; even the follies of her friends she touches with a light hand; her wit never stings, she has a charitable interpretation for everything. Her sweet and happy temper played lightly even with sorrow and wrong-doing. She was pure in an age when purity was rare, and if she had a single fault it is that she was merely something too lenient in her tolerance. She was a genial optimist, not from general indifference, but from love, for her friendships made a real part of her existence. The graphic letters to Pomponne describing the trial of Fouquet prove a noble fidelity of heart that defies misfortune and disgrace. Some of her own letters, discovered among the fallen surintendant's papers and read by the king, caused for a moment much talk and scandal, in allaying which Bussy did his cousin a good service. Yet furtively he had done her a grievous wrong. Having been in difficulties about 1656 he had applied to her for a loan of 10,000 écus (£2400), but, some delay being occasioned by Bienbon's desire to look into the securities, he took offence, found the money from the Marquise de Montglas, and, during the enforced solitude of a short banishment to his country-house for some scandalous impieties, wrote a few satirical sketches of the courtiers for the amusement of this mistress—the Histoire amoureuse des Gaules. In this unclean company a cruel and lying description of Madame de Sévigné was inserted, and when the book was printed at Liège (1665), without Bussy's knowledge, she had the mortification to find herself in the mouths of all the scandal-mongers of the day. Bussy was arrested on the 17th April, imprisoned in the Bastille for thirteen months, and sentenced to banishment from Paris for seventeen years. It needed only to be unfortunate to ensure the sympathy of Madame de Sévigné, and the reconciliation, which was complete by 1668, perhaps left the repentant Bussy, says Mesnard, 'with a more tender and serious feeling than he had ever experienced in his life before.' She herself invented the word Rabutinage to express the family ties and the common sympathy which substantially bound the two together.
Meantime her daughter had grown up with a beauty, if not a personal charm, that far surpassed her mother's, and Madame de Sévigné's heart was filled with joy at the sensation made by 'the prettiest girl in France' on her first appearance at court in the winter of 1662-63. In January 1669 she married François Adhémar, the Comte de Grignan, then Lieutenant-général of Languedoc, but ere the close of the year, of Provence—an office which obliged him at once to leave Paris. He had been twice married already, was thirty-seven, of ancient race, honourable in his life and dignified in manners, but he was overwhelmed in financial difficulties which were yet to cause much trouble to Madame de Sévigné. The great grief of her life was this separation from her much-loved daughter, but it is mainly to it that we owe those letters extending, with intervals of union (longest as well as most frequent between 1677 and 1688) over the twenty-five years until her death. Bussy and Saint-Simon say that the daughter lacked heart, and it is at least certain that she was proud, shy, and uncommunicative to the outer world. But she really loved her mother, and never failed, except when ill, to write to her twice a week throughout all the years of separation. It is unfortunate for her that these letters have been destroyed, and probably also, as Sainte-Beuve suggests, her mother has harmed her somewhat in our eyes by praising her too much. She seems cold by contrast with her mother's overflowing affection, but it is impossible in the nature of things that so much love as Madame de Sévigné's could have been lavished without forcing a return. Her love was accompanied by all the doubts and fears that are the characteristic marks of another form of human emotion; and its exceptional intensity cannot be understood unless we remember how it came to fill her heart at a moment when the dear illusion of a husband's love had been rudely shattered for ever. 'Vous ne comprenez point encore trop bien l'amour maternel : tant mieux, ma fille, il est violent,' she writes. Its iteration has deterred many a reader at the outset, as it long did so fine and sympathetic a spirit as Edward FitzGerald. Yet he lived to take her altogether to his heart, and he thus ends a letter with a personal touch of pathos worthy of herself: 'I sometimes lament I did not know her before; but perhaps such an Acquaintance comes in best to cheer one toward the End.'
At fifty her splendid health was first shaken at the Rochers by a violent fit of rheumatism; thereafter till the close her only troubles were her son-in-law's vast expenditure and ever-increasing debts, and one by one the deaths of her dearest friends. Her life wore itself away in a round of duties at Paris, at the Rochers, and in visits to the country-houses of her friends and to her daughter in Provence. Nothing in her was more wonderful than her adaptability of disposition; she is happy alike by the bedside of a sick friend, in her drives with Madame Scarron, soon to be virtual queen of France, in the society of the court, and alone under the dense leafage of her park at the Rochers. One thing only we would have had otherwise than it is, but it would be a complete anachronism to ask for more sympathy than she has to show for the miserable Breton peasants under the cruel campaign of 1675. Her son Charles had some follies which cost money, before his marriage (1683); but he stands out an attractive figure enough, generous and warm-hearted, content with an unequal half of his mother's heart. Bienbon died in 1683; Bussy and Madame de la Fayette in 1693. Her letters grow sadder as she begins to find herself alone, yet some of the latest stand among the first in literary value. She never grew old, for her heart retained its warmth; yet she lived to see son and grandson married, and after nursing her daughter through a tedious illness was herself attacked by smallpox, and died calmly and without fear, 18th April 1696.
Madame de Sévigné's twenty-five years of letters to her daughter reveal the inner history of the time in wonderful detail, but the most interesting thing in the whole 1600 (one-third letters to her from others) remains herself. She was genuinely religious without superstition, a strong sympathy with Port-Royal manifest throughout; she had read widely and gained much from conversation, and she had lived in the time of Pascal, Molière, Racine, Bossnet, and La Rochefoucauld. Still more, she possessed the great natural gifts of a solid understanding and strong good sense. But it needed the warm touch of affection to make all these qualities live, and to give her letters the freedom, the rapidity, the life of spoken words. Hence her sparkling wit, her swiftly changing emotions, her unstudied yet admirable phrase, clear, firm, and natural, the tenderest sentiments and gayest flights of fancy ever expressed with unfailing grace and the indefinable charm of style. Her imagination, warmed by sympathy and love, realises the conditions of those to whom she writes, and enables her to enter into the thoughts of others, as well as to reflect as in a mirror the world around herself. Yet over all there is a gravity and reserve characteristic of that stately and ceremonious age. She never once thous-and-thees anybody; a certain dignity remains even in the most intimate relations. The perfection of her letters was from the first moment recognised, and the question has often been asked did that piquant grace of detail, that charming variety in the repetition of the same thoughts, cost her pains. No doubt she knew she wrote well, however little she thought of fame, yet this knowledge did not exclude sincerity, and she must have written fast to have written so much—'Je fais de la prose avec une facilité qui vous tue,' she says. And she does not write alike to all people; to Bussy and the sprightly Mme. de Coulanges there is a little restraint: to her daughter it is heart to heart, now private affairs and prattle about her neighbours, now matters of state and the graver questions of life and death, written with swift-flowing pen for her eye alone. We may love Madame de Grignan only for her dear mother's sake, yet we owe to her an inestimable debt of gratitude, for it was her care that preserved the precious letters of Madame de Sévigné, and bequeathed them to the endless affection of posterity.
The earliest of her letters that were published were those to Bussy, printed in his Mémoires (1696-97). The first edition of the Lettres was printed in 1726 by Bussy's son, the Abbé de Bussy, to whom her granddaughter Pauline (Madame de Simiane) had given transcripts of the originals. A more complete edition, authorised by the family, was the final one of those edited by the Chevalier Marius de Perrin (8 vols. 1754). Further editions were innumerable—three only need be mentioned, those of the Abbé de Vauxcelles (1801), Gouvelle (1806), and M. de Monmerqué—an abiding monument of patient industry (10 vols. 1818-19). The final edition is, however, that in the 'Grands Écrivains de la France,' begun by M. de Monmerqué, and finished by A. Régnier, Paul Mesnard, and E. Sommer (14 vols. 1865-67; vol. i., with Mesnard's life; vols. xiii.-xiv. a Lexique by Sommer), especially as supplemented by Ch. Capmas in Lettres inédites de Madame de Sévigné (2 vols. 1876). See Walckenaer, Mémoires touchants la Vie et les Écrits de Madame de Sévigné (5 vols. 1842-52; vol. vi. by Aubenas, 1865); the Comtesse de Puliga, Madame de Sévigné, her Correspondents and Contemporaries (2 vols. 1873); the admirable studies by Miss Thackeray in 'Foreign Classics' (1881) and Gaston Boissier in 'Les Grands Écrivains Français' (1887), as well as those by Combes (1885) and Vallery-Radot (1888); Léon de la Brière's Madame de Sévigné en Bretagne (2d ed. 1882); and Saporta's La Famille de Madame de Sévigné en Provence (1889). See also Sainte-Beuve's Portraits de Femmes, Causeries du Lundi (vol. i.), and Nouveaux Lundis (vol. i.); E. Scherer's Études sur la Litt. Contemp. (vols. ii. and iii.), and chapter 6 of Amelia Gere Mason's Women of the French Salons (1891).