Here we have the real Madame de Sevigne, whom we love, on whom we rely, who is as earnest as she is amiable and gay, who goes to the very core of things, and who tells the truth of herself as well as of others. “You ask me, my dear child, whether I continue to be really fond of life. I confess to you that I find poignant sorrows in it, but I am even more disgusted with death; I feel so wretched at having to end all this thereby, that, if I could turn back again, I would ask for nothing better. I find myself under an obligation which perplexes me: I embarked upon life without my consent, and I must go out of it; that overwhelms me. And how shall I go? Which way? By what door? When will it be? In what condition? Shall I suffer a thousand, thousand pains, which will make me die desperate? Shall I have brain-fever? Shall I die of an accident? How shall I be with God? What shall I have to show Him? Shall fear, shall necessity bring me back to Him? Shall I have no sentiment but that of dread? What can I hope? Am I worthy of heaven? Am I worthy of hell? Nothing is such madness as to leave one’s salvation in uncertainty, but nothing is so natural; and the stupid life I lead is the easiest thing in the world to understand. I bury myself in these thoughts, and I find death so terrible, that I hate life more because it leads me thereto than because of the thorns with which it is planted. You will say that I want to live forever then: not at all; but, if my opinion had been asked, I should have preferred to die in my nurse’s arms; that would have removed me from vexations of spirit, and would have given me Heaven full surely and easily.”
Madame de Sevigne would have very much scandalized those gentlemen of Port-Royal, if she had let them see into the bottom of her heart as she showed it to her daughter. Pascal used to say, “There are but three sorts of persons: those who serve God, having found Him; those who employ themselves in seeking Him, not having found Him; and those who live without seeking Him or having found Him. The first are reasonable and happy; the last are mad and miserable; the intermediate are miserable and reasonable.” Without ever having sought and found God, in the absolute sense intended by Pascal, Madame de Sevigne kept approaching Him by gentle degrees. “We are reading a treatise by M. Namon of Port-Royal on continuous prayer; though he is a hundred feet above my head, he nevertheless pleases and charms us. One is very glad to see that there have been and still are in the world people to whom God communicates His Holy Spirit in such abundance; but, O God! when shall we have some spark, some degree of it? How sad to find one’s self so far from it, and so near to something else! O, fie! Let us not speak of such plight as that: it calls for sighs, and groans, and humiliations a hundred times a day.”
After having suffered so much from separation, and so often traversed France to visit her daughter in Provence, Madame de Sevigne had the happiness to die in her house at Grignan. She was sixty-nine, and she had been ill for some time; she was subject to rheumatism; her son’s wildness had for a long while retarded the arrangement of her affairs; at last he had turned over a new leaf, he was married, he was a devotee. Madame de Grignan had likewise found a wife for her son, whom the king had made a colonel at a very early age; and a husband for her daughter, little Pauline, now Madame de Simiane. “All this together is extremely nice, and too nice,” wrote Madame de Sevigne to M. de Bussy, “for I find the days going so fast, and the months and the years, that, for my part, my dear cousin, I can no longer hold them. Time flies, and carries me along in spite of me; it is all very fine for me to wish to stay it, it bears me away with it, and the idea of this causes me great fear; you will make a pretty shrewd guess why.” Death came at last, and Madame de Sevigne lost all her terrors. She was attacked by small-pox whilst her sick daughter was confined to her bed, and died on the 19th of April, 1696, thanking God that she was the first to go, after having so often trembled for her daughter’s health. “What calls far more for our admiration than for our regrets,” writes M. de Grignan to M. de Coulanges, “is the spectacle of a brave woman facing death, of which she had no doubt from the first days of her illness, with astounding firmness and submission. This person, so tender and so weak towards all that she loved, showed nothing but courage and piety when she believed that her hour was come; and we could not but remark of what utility and of what importance it is to have the mind stocked with good matter and holy reading, for the which Madame de Sevigne had a liking, not to say a wonderful hungering, from the use she managed to make of that good store in the last moments of her life.” She had often taken her daughter to task for not being fond of books. “There is a certain person who undoubtedly has plenty of wits, but of so nice and so fastidious a sort, that she cannot read anything but five or six sublime works, which is a sign of distinguished taste. She cannot bear historical books; a great deprivation this, and of that which is a subsistence to everybody else. She has another misfortune, which is, that she cannot read twice over those choice books which she esteems exclusively. This person says that she is insulted when she is told that she is not fond of reading: another bone to pick.” Madame de Sevigne’s liking for good books accompanied her to the last, and helped her to make a good end.
All the women who had been writers in her time died before Madame de Sevigne. Madame de Motteville, a judicious and sensible woman, more independent at the bottom of her heart than in externals, had died in 1689, exclusively occupied, from the time that she lost Queen Anne of Austria, in works of piety and in drawing up her Memoires. Mdlle. de Montpensier, “my great Mademoiselle,” as Madame de Sevigne used to call her, had died at Paris on the 5th of April, 1693, after a violent illness, as feverish as her life. Impassioned and haughty, with her head so full of her greatness that she did not marry in her youth, thinking nobody worthy of her except the king and the emperor, who had no fancy for her, and ending by a private marriage with the Duke of Lauzun, “a cadet of Gascony,” whom the king would not permit her to espouse publicly; clever, courageous, hare-brained, generous, she has herself sketched her own portrait. “I am tall, neither fat nor thin, of a very fine and easy figure. I have a good mien, arms and hands not beautiful, but a beautiful skin and throat too. I have a straight leg and a well-shaped foot; my hair is light, and of a beautiful auburn; my face is long, its contour is handsome, nose large and aquiline; mouth neither large nor small, but chiselled, and with a very pleasing expression; lips vermilion; teeth not fine, but not frightful either. My eyes are blue, neither large nor small, but sparkling, soft, and proud, like my mien. I talk a great deal, without saying silly things or using bad words. I am a very vicious enemy, being very choleric and passionate, and that, added to my birth, may well make my enemies tremble; but I have also a noble and a kindly soul. I am incapable of any base and black deed; and so I am more disposed to mercy than to justice. I am melancholic; I like reading good and solid books; trifles bore me, except verses, and them I like, of whatever sort they may be, and undoubtedly I am as good a judge of such things as if I were a scholar.”
A few days after Mademoiselle, died, likewise at Paris, Madelaine de la Vergne, Marchioness of La Fayette, the most intimate friend of Madame de Sevigne. “Never did we have the smallest cloud upon our friendship,” the latter would say; “long habit had not made her merit stale to me, the flavor of it was always fresh and new; I paid her many attentions from the mere prompting of my heart, without the propriety to which we are bound by friendship having anything to do with it. I was assured, too, that I constituted her dearest consolation, and for forty years past it had always been the same thing.” Sensible, clever, a sweet and safe acquaintance, Madame de La Fayette was as simple and as true in her relations with her confidantes as in her writings. La Princesse de Olives alone has outlived the times and the friends of Madame de La Fayette. Following upon the “great sword-thrusts” of La Calprenede or Mdlle. de Scudery, this delicate, elegant, and virtuous tale, with its pure and refined style, enchanted the court, which recognized itself at its best, and painted under its brightest aspect; it was farewell forever to the “Pays de Tendre.” Madame de La Fayette had very bad health; she wrote to Madame de Sevigne on the 14th of July, 1693, “Here is what I have done since I wrote to you last. I have had two attacks of fever; for six months I had not been purged; I am purged once, I am purged twice; the day after the second time, I sit down to table. O, dear! I feel a pain in my heart; I do not want any soup. Have a little meat then. No, I do not want any. Well, you will have some fruit. I think I will. Very well, then, have some. I don’t know, I think I will have something by and by; let me have some soup and a chicken this evening. Here is the evening, and there are the soup and the chicken: I don’t want them. I am nauseated; I will go to bed; I prefer sleeping to eating. I go to bed, I turn round, I turn back, I have no pain, but I have no sleep either. I call, I take a book, I shut it up. Day comes, I get up, I go to the window. It strikes four, five, six; I go to bed again, I doze till seven, I get up at eight, I sit down to table at twelve, to no purpose, as yesterday. I lay myself down in my bed again in the evening, to no purpose, as the night before. Are you ill? Nay. I am in this state for three days and three nights. At present I am getting some sleep again, but I still eat merely mechanically, horse-wise, rubbing my mouth with vinegar otherwise I am very well, and I haven’t even so much pain in the head.” Fault was found with Madame de La Fayette for not going out. “She had a mortal melancholy. What absurdity again! Is she not the most fortunate woman in the world? That is what people said,” writes Madame de Sevigne; “it needed that she should be dead to prove that she had good reason for not going out, and for being melancholy. Her reins and her heart were all gone was not that enough to cause those fits of despondency of which she complained? And so, during her life, she showed reason, and after death she showed reason, and never was she without that divine reason which was her principal gift.”
Madame de La Fayette had in her life one great sorrow, which had completed the ruin of her health. On the 16th of March, 1680, after the closest and longest of intimacies, she had lost her best friend, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. Carried away in his youth by party strife and an ardent passion for Madame de Longueville, he had at a later period sought refuge in the friendship of Madame de La Fayette. “When women have well-formed minds,” he would say, “I like their conversation better than that of men; you find with them a certain gentleness which is not met with amongst us, and it seems to me, besides, that they express themselves with greater clearness, and that they give a more pleasant turn to the things they say.” A meddler and intriguer during the Fronde, sceptical and bitter in his Maximes, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld was amiable and kindly in his private life. Factions and the court had taught him a great deal about human nature; he had seen it and judged of it from its bad side. Witty, shrewd, and often profound, he was too severe to be just. The bitterness of his spirit breathed itself out completely in his writings; he kept for his friends that kindliness and that sensitiveness of which he made sport. “He gave me wit,” Madame de La Fayette would say, “but I reformed his heart.” He had lost his son at the passage of the Rhine, in 1672. He was ill, suffering cruelly. “I was yesterday at M. de La Rochefoucauld’s,” writes Madame de Sevigne, in 1680. “I found him uttering loud shrieks; his pain was such that his endurance was quite overcome without a single scrap remaining. The excessive pain upset him to such a degree that he was sitting out in the open air with a violent fever upon him. He begged me to send you word, and to assure you that the wheel-broken do not suffer during a single moment what he suffers one half of his life, and so he wishes for death as a happy release.” He died with Bossuet at his pillow. “Very well prepared as regards his conscience,” says Madame de Sevigne again; “that is all settled; but, in other respects, it might be the illness and death of his neighbor which is in question, he is not flurried about it, he is not troubled about it. Believe me, my daughter, it is not to no purpose that he has been making reflections all his life; he has approached his last moments in such wise that they have had nothing that was novel or strange for him.” M. de La Rochefoucauld thought worse of men than of life. “I have scarcely any fear of things,” he had said; “I am not at all afraid of death.” With all his rare qualities and great opportunities he had done nothing but frequently embroil matters in which he had meddled, and had never been anything but a great lord with a good deal of wit. Actionless penetration and sceptical severity may sometimes clear the judgment and the thoughts, but they give no force or influence that has power over men. “There was always a something (je ne sais quoi) about M. de La Rochefoucauld,” writes Cardinal de Retz, who did not like him; “he was for meddling in intrigues from his childhood, and at a time when he had no notion of petty interests, which were never his foible, and when he did not understand great ones, which, on the other hand, were never his strength. He was never capable of doing anything in public affairs, and I am sure I don’t know why. His views were not sufficiently broad, and he did not even see comprehensively all that was within his range, but his good sense,—very good, speculatively,—added to his suavity, his insinuating style, and his easy manners, which are admirable, ought to have compensated more than it did for his lack of penetration. He always showed habitual irresolution, but I really do not know to what to attribute this irresolution; it could not, with him, have come from the fertility of his imagination, which is anything but lively. He was never a warrior, though he was very much the soldier. He was never a good partyman, though he was engaged in it all his life. That air of bashfulness and timidity which you see about him in private life was turned in public life into an air of apology. He always considered himself to need one, which fact, added to his maxims, which do not show sufficient belief in virtue, and to his practice, which was always to get out of affairs with as much impatience as he had shown to get into them, leads me to conclude that he would have done far better to know his own place, and reduce himself to passing, as he might have passed, for the most polite of courtiers and the worthiest (le plus honnete) man, as regards ordinary life, that ever appeared in his century.”
Cardinal de Retz had more wits, more courage, and more resolution than the Duke of La Rochefoucauld; he was more ambitious and more bold; he was, like him, meddlesome, powerless, and dangerous to the state. He thought himself capable of superseding Cardinal Mazarin, and far more worthy than he of being premier minister; but every time he found himself opposed to the able Italian he was beaten. All that he displayed, during the Fronde, of address, combination, intrigue, and resolution, would barely have sufficed to preserve his name in history, if he had not devoted his leisure in his retirement to writing his Memoires. Vigorous, animated, always striking, often amusing, sometimes showing rare nobleness and high-mindedness, his stories and his portraits transport us to the very midst of the scenes he desires to describe and the personages he makes the actors in them. His rapid, nervous, picturesque style is the very image of that little dark, quick, agile man, more soldier than bishop, and more intriguer than soldier, faithfully and affectionately beloved by his friends, detested by his very numerous enemies, and dreaded by many people, for the causticity of his tongue, long after the troubles of the Fronde had ceased, and he was reduced to be a wanderer in foreign lands, still Archbishop of Paris without being able to set foot in it. Having retired to Commercy, he fell under Louis XIV.‘s suspicion. Madame de Sevigne, who was one of his best friends, was anxious about him. “As to our cardinal, I have often thought as you,” she wrote to her daughter; “but, whether it be that the enemies are not in a condition to cause fear, or that the friends are not subject to take alarm, it is certain that there is no commotion. You show a very proper spirit in being anxious about the welfare of a person who is so distinguished, and to whom you owe so much affection.” “Can I forget him whom I see everywhere in the story of our misfortunes,” exclaimed Bossuet, in his funeral oration over Michael Le Tellier, “that man so faithful to individuals, so formidable to the state, of a character so high that he could not be esteemed, or feared, or hated by halves, that steady genius whom, the while he shook the universe, we saw attracting to himself a dignity which in the end he determined to relinquish as having been too dearly bought, as he had the courage to recognize in the place that is the most eminent in Christendom, and as being, after all, quite incapable of satisfying his desires, so conscious was he of his mistake and of the emptiness of human greatness? But, so long as he was bent upon obtaining what he was one day to despise, he kept everything moving by means of powerful and secret springs, and, after that all parties were overthrown, he seemed still to uphold himself alone, and alone to still threaten the victorious favorite with his sad but fearless gaze.” When Bossuet sketched this magnificent portrait of Mazarin’s rival, Cardinal de Retz had been six years dead, in 1679.
Mesdames de Sevigne and de La Fayette were of the court, as were the Duke of La Rochefoucauld and Cardinal de Retz. La Bruyere lived all his life rubbing shoulders with the court; he knew it, he described it, but he was not of it, and could not be of it. Nothing is known of his family. He was born at Dourdan in 1639, and had just bought a post in the Treasury (tresorier de France) at Caen, when Bossuet, who knew him, induced him to remove to Paris as teacher of history to the duke, grandson of the great Conde. He remained forever attached to the person of the prince, who gave him a thousand crowns a year, and he lived to the day of his death at Conde’s house. “He was a philosopher,” says Abbe d’Olivet in his Histoire de l’Academie Francaise; “all he dreamt of was a quiet life, with his friends and his books, making a good choice of both; not courting or avoiding pleasure; ever inclined for moderate fun, and with a talent for setting it going; polished in manners, and discreet in conversation; dreading every sort of ambition, even that of displaying wit.” This was not quite the opinion formed by Boileau of La Bruyere. “Maximilian came to see me at Auteuil,” writes Boileau to Racine on the 19th of May, 1687, the very year in which the Caracteres was published; “he read me some of his Theophrastus. He is a very worthy (honnete) man, and one who would lack nothing, if nature had created him as agreeable as he is anxious to be. However, he has wit, learning, and merit.” Amidst his many and various portraits, La Bruyere has drawn his own with an amiable pride. “I go to your door, Ctesiphon; the need I have of you hurries me from my bed and from my room. Would to Heaven I were neither your client nor your bore. Your slaves tell me that you are engaged and cannot see me for a full hour yet; I return before the time they appointed, and they tell me that you have gone out. What can you be doing, Ctesiphon, in that remotest part of your rooms, of so laborious a kind as to prevent you from seeing me? You are filing some bills, you are comparing a register; you are signing your name, you are putting the flourish. I had but one thing to ask you, and you had but one word to reply: yes or no. Do you want to be singular? Render service to those who are dependent upon you, you will be more so by that behavior than by not letting yourself be seen. O man of importance and overwhelmed with business, who in your turn have need of my offices, come into the solitude of my closet; the philosopher is accessible; I shall not put you off to another day. You will find me over those works of Plato which treat of the immortality of the soul and its distinctness from the body; or with pen in hand, to calculate the distances of Saturn and Jupiter. I admire God in His works, and I seek by knowledge of the truth to regulate my mind and become better. Come in, all doors are open to you; my antechamber is not made to wear you out with waiting for me; come right in to me without giving me notice. You bring me something more precious than silver and gold, if it be an opportunity of obliging you. Tell me, what can I do for you? Must I leave my books, my study, my work, this line I have just begun? What a fortunate interruption for me is that which is of service to you!”