II. MME De GRIGNAN

Mme de Sévigné's only daughter, to whom a multitude of her letters were addressed, was born in 1648 and died in 1705, it is said of grief at having lost her only son of small-pox the year before. Her life was passed between Grignan, in Provence, her husband*s résidence, and Paris ; and her cold, philosophical nature, early imbued with the Cartesian philosophy of *reason,' contrasts strangely in the correspondence with the passionate, excitable, poetic, and rhetorical tempérament of her mother. Her éducation, like her mother's, was most solid and varied. Latin, Italian, physics, metaphysics formed the foun-

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dation of it, and she inherîted her mother's gîft of fluent and noble letter-writing. Mme de La Fayette said of her : " Elle serait parfaite si elle n'était trop sensible/' Malicious critics hâve without foundation maintained that she gave to Molière a hint for his famous Femmes Savantes, Most of her letters hâve unfortunately perished.

xvi MME DE SE VIGNE,

only twenty-eight years old. She continued for more than forty years to formpartof thebestsociety of the capital, without sufïering the least stain on her réputation. The selfish vanity of the superintendent Foucquet made him keep certain of her letters ; but though they were discovered in a casket which was fatal to many of his friends of both sexes, Madame de Sévigné came scathless out of the ordeal. In 1669 her daughter, then twenty-two years old, married the Count de Grignan, a Provençal gentleman of the noblest birth, of great estate, rank, and fortune, but already twice a widower, past middle âge, plain, and of somewhat embarrassed means, considering the great expenses which. as Govemor of Provence, he had to meet He was, however, a man of good sensé and probity, and his wife seems to hâve been sincerely attached to him. The great bulk of Madame de Sévigné 's voluminous correspondence was addressed to her daughter, for whom she had an almost frantic fondness ; Charles de Sévigné, though apparently far the more lovable of the two, having but an inferior share of his mother's affection. The letters to Madame de Grignan are for the most part dated either f rom Paris (in which case they are f ull of court news and gossip), or from Les Rochers, the country seat of the Sévignés, near Vitré, in which case they are full of social satire and curions détails of the provincial life of that time. One very interesting séries describes the habits and regimen of Vichy, which Madame de Sévigné visited in conséquence of a severe attack of rheumatism. The correspondence thus serves as a minute and detailed history of the author for the last thirty years of her life, except during her rare visits to Grignan, in one of which, as has been mentioned, she caught the illness which proved fatal to her. It has been said that Madame de Sévigné 's letters are very numerous. Those to her daughter especially were garbled in the earlier éditions by omissions, and by the substitution of phrases which seemed to the 1 8th century more suitable than the fresh nature of the originals. The édition cited gives the extant M S S. faithfully. The enthusiastic affection lavished by the mother on the daughter naturally commends itself differently to différent persons. It is certain that if it is not tedious, it is only due to the extraordinary literary art of the writer, an art which is at once the most artful and the most artless to be anywhere found. The only other faults of the letters are an occasional crudity of diction

MME DE SE VIGNE, xviî

(which, however, is, when rightly taken, perfectly innocent and even valuable as exemplifying the manners of the time), and a decided heartlessness in relating the misf ortunes of ail those in whom the writer is not personally interested. Madame de Sévigné has been blamed for not sympathising more with the oppression of the French people during her time. This, however, is an unfair charge. In the first place she sîmply expresses the current political ideas çf her day, and in the second place, she goes decidedly beyond those ideas in the direction of sympathy. Her treatment of some of her own equals leaves much more to désire. The account of Madame de Brinvilliers' sufiEerings — unworthy of much pity as the victim was — is callous to brutality, and it seems to be sufficient for anyone to hâve ever offended Madame de Grignan, or to hâve spoken slightingly of her, to put him, or her, out of the pale of even ordinary human sjrmpathy. But no other f ault can be found. For vivid social portraiture the book equals Saint Simon at his best, while it is far more uniformly good. The letters deccribing the engagement of La Grande Mademoiselle to Lauzun, the death of Vatel, the trial of Foucquet, the Vichy sojourn, the meeting of the states of Brittany, and many others, are not to be surpassed in this respect Unlike Saint Simon, too. Madame de Sévigné has no fixed idea — except that of Madame de Grignan's perfections, which rarely interfères — to prevent her from taking fresh, original, and acute views of things in gênerai as distinguished from mère court intrigues. Her literary criticism is excellent, and if she somewhat overvalues moralists like Nicole and novelists like Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who ministered to her peculiar tastes, her remarks on the great preachers, on La Fontaine, on Corneille and Racine, display a singular insight as well as a singular power of expression. She is, indeed, except in politics, on which few persons of her class had at the time any clear or distinct ideas, never superficial ; and this union of just thought with accurate observation and exceptional power of expression makes her position in literature.