In her youth Mme. de Sevigne did not like the country because it was windy and spoiled her beautiful complexion; perhaps, too, because it was lonely. But with her happy gift of adaptation she came to love its tranquillity. She went often to the solitary old family chateau in Brittany to make economies and to retrieve the fortune which suffered successively from the reckless extravagance of her husband and son, and from the expensive tastes of the Comte de Grignan, who was acting governor of Provence, and lived in a state much too magnificent for his resources. Of her life at The Rocks she has left us many exquisite pictures. "I go out into the pleasant avenues; I have a footman who follows me; I have books, I change place, I vary the direction of my promenade; a book of devotion, a book of history; one changes from one to the other; that gives diversion; one dreams a little of God, of his providence; one possesses one's soul, one thinks of the future."
She embellishes her park, superintends the planting of trees, and "a labyrinth from which one could not extricate one's self without the thread of Ariadne;" she fills her garden with orange trees and jessamine until the air is so perfumed that she imagines herself in Provence. She sits in the shade and embroiders while her son "reads trifles, comedies which he plays like Moliere, verses, romances, tales; he is very amusing, he has esprit, he is appreciative, he entertains us." She notes the changing color of the leaves, the budding of the springtime. "It seems to me that in case of need I should know very well how to make a spring," she writes. She loves too the "fine, crystal days of autumn." Sometimes, in the evening, she has "gray-brown thoughts which grow black at night," but she never dwells upon these. Her "habitual thought—that which one must have for God, if one does his duty"—is for her daughter. "My dear child," she writes, "it is only you that I prefer to the tranquil repose I enjoy here."
If her own soul is open to us in all its variable and charming moods, we also catch in her letters many unconscious reflections of her daughter's character. She offers her a little needed worldly advice. "Try, my child," she says, "to adjust yourself to the manners and customs of the people with whom you live; adapt yourself to that which is not bad; do not be disgusted with that which is only mediocre; make a pleasure of that which is not ridiculous." She entreats her to love the little Pauline and not to scold her, nor send her away to the convent as she did her sister Marie-Blanche. With what infinite tenderness she always speaks of this child, smiling at her small outbursts of temper, soothing her little griefs, and giving wise counsels about her education. Evidently she doubted the patience of the mother. "You do not yet too well comprehend maternal love," she writes; "so much the better, my child; it is violent."
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.
Among those who exercised the most important influence upon the life of Mme. de Sevigne was Corbinelli, the wise counselor, who, with a soul untouched by the storms of adversity through which he had passed, devoted his life to letters and the interests of his friends. No one had a finer appreciation of her gifts and her character. Her compared her letters to those of Cicero, but he always sought to temper her ardor, and to turn her thoughts toward an elevated Christian philosophy. "In him," said Mme. de Sevigne, "I defend one who does not cease to celebrate the perfections and the existence of God; who never judges his neighbor, who excuses him always; who is insensible to the pleasures and delights of life, and entirely submissive to the will of Providence; in fine, I sustain the faithful admirer of Sainte Therese, and of my grandmother, Sainte Chantal." This gentle, learned, and disinterested man, whose friendship deepened with years, was an unfailing resource. In her troubles and perplexities she seeks his advice; in her intellectual tastes she is sustained by his sympathy. She speaks often of the happy days in Provence, when, together with her daughter, they translate Tacitus, read Tasso, and get entangled in endless discussions upon Descartes. Even Mme. de Grignan, who rarely likes her mother's friends, in the end gives due consideration to this loyal confidant, though she does not hesitate to ridicule the mysticism into which he finally drifted.
After Mme. de La Fayette, the woman whose relations with Mme. de Sevigne were the most intimate was Mme. de Coulanges, who merits here more than a passing word. Her wit was proverbial, her popularity universal. The Leaf, the Fly, the Sylph, the Goddess, her friend calls her in turn, with many a light thrust at her volatile but loyal character. This brilliant, spirituelle, caustic woman was the wife of a cousin of the Marquis de Sevigne, who was as witty as herself and more inconsequent. Both were amiable, both sparkled with bons mots and epigrams, but they failed to entertain each other. The husband goes to Italy or Germany or passes his time in various chateaux, where he is sure of a warm welcome and good cheer. The wife goes to Versailles, visits her cousin Louvois, the Duchesse de Richelieu, and Mme. de Maintenon, who loves her much; or presides at home over a salon that is always well filled. "Ah, Madame," said M. de Barillon, "how much your house pleases me! I shall come here very evening when I am tired of my family." "Monsieur," she replied, "I expect you tomorrow." When she was ill and likely to die, her husband had a sudden access of affection, and nursed her with great tenderness. Mme. de Coulanges dying and her husband in grief, seemed somehow out of the order of things. "A dead vivacity, a weeping gaiety, these are prodigies," wrote Mme. de Sevigne. When the wife recovered, however, they took their separate ways as before.
"Your letters are delicious," she wrote once to Mme. de Sevigne, "and you are as delicious as your letters." Her own were as much sought in her time, but she had no profound affection to consecrate them and no children to collect them, so that only a few have been preserved. There is a curious vein of philosophy in one she wrote to her husband, when the pleasures of life began to fade. "As for myself, I care little for the world; I find it no longer suited to my age; I have no engagements, thank God, to retain me there. I have seen all there is to see. I have only an old face to present to it, nothing new to show nor to discover there. Ah! What avails it to recommence every day the visits, to trouble one's self always about things that do not concern us? .... My dear sir, we must think of something more solid." She disappears from the scene shortly after the death of Mme. De Sevigne. Long years of silence and seclusion, and another generation heard one day that she had lived and that she was dead.
The friends of Mme. de Sevigne slip away one after another; La Rochefoucauld, De Retz, Mme. de La Fayette are gone. "Alas!" she writes, "how this death goes running about and striking on all sides." The thought troubles her. "I am embarked in life without my consent," she says; "I must go out of it—that overwhelms me. And how shall I go? Whence: By what door? When will it be? In what disposition: How shall I be with God? What have I to present to him? What can I hope?—Am I worthy of paradise? Am I worthy of hell? What an alternative! What a complication! I would like better to have died in the arms of my nurse."