In 1624 the King gave the abbey of Livry to Christophe de Coulanges as commendator. He was then only eighteen years old.
In both a spiritual and a worldly sense the abbey was in a pitiable condition: its church was crumbling, its houses were scarcely inhabitable, and great disorder reigned among the few ecclesiastics who remained in the cloister. The young abbot was pious and economical. The abbey was reformed with his consent, the church restored, and a part of the cloister rebuilt. He put up this grand building of noble and simple aspect, which still stands; he made of it an agreeable country house, surrounded by orange trees, flower beds bits of water, and easily accessible, for a fine avenue joined it to the highway from Paris to Meaux. He furnished apartments there, received his family and his friends, and led a life without display, but without privations. Besides, if the rule was then strictly observed in the monastery, the monks were not very numerous: in 1662, there were only eight professed friars there. [30]
In 1636, the Abbé de Coulanges was invested with the guardianship of a little orphan, his niece, Marie de Chantai: the child was ten years old; the tutor twenty-nine. For fifty years he watched over the person and the property of his ward with an entirely paternal solicitude, gave her very wise masters, like Ménage and Chapelain, occupied himself with her establishment and, when she became a widow, wisely administered her fortune. But everything was said by Madame de Sévigné herself, when the "very good" died: "There is nothing good that he did not do for me, either in giving me his own property entirely, or in preserving and reestablishing that of my children. He drew me from the abyss in which I was at the death of M. de Sévigné, he won lawsuits, he restored all my properties to good condition, he paid our debts, he made the estate which my son inhabits the most handsome and agreeable in the world, he married off my children; in a word I owe peace and repose in life to his continuous cares..." And she adds this reflection so tenderly true and so sadly human: "The loss that we feel when the old die is often considerable when we have great reasons for loving them and when we have always seen them." (September 2, 1687.)
Madame de Sévigné had passed her youth at Livry near this worthy man. After the death of her husband she stayed there from choice. She lived happily there with her daughter, and the latter even returned there several times after her marriage. These memories rendered Livry still more dear to Madame de Sévigné, who, on an April day, after having heard the nightingales and contemplated the budding greenery of the park, wrote to Madame de Grignan: "It is very difficult for me to revisit this place, this garden, these alleys, this little bridge, this avenue, this meadow, this mill, this little view, this forest, without thinking of my very dear child." (April 22, 1672.) In the summer, when they put her little daughter in her care, she took her to Livry: "Presently I am going to Livry; I will take with me my little child and her nurse and all the little household...." (May 27, 1672.) She loved to receive her son at Livry. She went to Livry to care for her maladies and to follow her treatments.
She also went there to pay her devotions in Holy Week: "I have made of this house a little Trappe.... I have found pleasure in the sadness which I have had here: a great solitude, a great silence, a sad office, Tenebræ intoned with devotion (I had never been at Livry in Holy Week), a canonical fast and a beauty in these gardens with which you would be charmed, all these have pleased me." (March 24, 1671.) It was her favorite place for writing, and she said that her mind and her body were there in peace. And, truly, almost all the letters which she wrote from Livry breathed joy and health.
So what despair, when, at the death of the Abbé de Coulanges, she believes that she will no longer be able to return to Livry and that she must say farewell to that agreeable solitude which she loves so much! "After having wept for the Abbé," she cries, "I weep for the abbey." (November 13, 1687.) Happily the successor of the Abbé de Coulanges is Séguier de la Verrière, former bishop of Nîmes. He is a very holy prelate, and allows Madame de Sévigné liberty to go to Livry, as in the days of the "very good." But Séguier dies. New anxieties. Finally the abbey is given to Denis Sanguin, bishop of Senlis, an uncle of Louis Sanguin, Lord of Livry, friend of the Coulanges and of Madame de Sévigné. Then she writes to her daughter: "It is true that these Sanguins, this Villeneuve, the idea of the old Pavin, these old acquaintances, are so confused with our garden and our forest, that it seems to me it is the same thing, and that not only have we lent it to them, but that it is still ours by the assurance of again finding there our old furniture and the same people whom we saw there so often. Finally, my child, we were worthy of this pretty solitude by the taste which we had and which we still have for it."
Since we have opened the letters of Madame de Sévigné, let us continue to mark the pages in which she has spoken of Livry, and let us seek the reason for the taste for this "pretty solitude" which she showed to the end.
She knew how to enjoy the days of sadness in this "solitude," for example when she had just been separated from her daughter, or when she had received some unpleasant news from Grignan. On these days she tasted the silence of the forest and of the meadow: "Here is a true place for the humor in which I am: there are hours and alleys whose holy horror is interrupted only by the love affairs of our stags, and I enjoy this solitude." (October 4, 1679.) And, a few days later: "I wish to boast of being all afternoon in this meadow talking to our cows and our sheep. I have good books and especially the little letters and Montaigne. What more is needed when I have not you?" (October 25, 1679.) But she was not the woman to content herself with the holy horror of the woods and to converse forever with the beasts of her meadow. She had a little of the turn of imagination of the good La Fontaine. But, affectionate and sociable, she also wished friends about her and loved conversation. At Livry she very often met her uncle, her cousins, the de Coulanges, her friend Corbinelli, the Abbé de Grignan and many others. She was neighborly with the families and guests of de Pomponne, de Clichy and de Chelles. Chariots brought from Paris loquacious visitors, rich in news. Walks on foot in the near-by forest were improvised.
Nowhere—not even at Les Rochers, where she drew so many pleasant landscapes—did Madame de Sévigné better express the pleasure given her by the spectacles of nature. She has expressed with inimitable art the particular charm of each season in a few words, and we might, by collecting certain passages of the letters written at Livry, compose, as it were, the picturesque calendar of Madame de Sévigné. Let us try it.