Portraits of women

by Gamaliel Bradford

But the most interesting thing in her letters is her soul, and she lays bare every fold and fibre of it, without the slightest bravado of self-revelation, but also without any attempt at reserve or concealment. She defies our minutest curiosity, because she could.

Above all, she was a healthy, normal temperament, with all the elements delightfully blended, a rich, human creature of balance and sanity. She knew well that life is of a mingled yarn, at its best not free from bitterness. She knew well what passion is, what grief is. This is just what makes her so rounded and so human. But, in most things, she held a sure rein and kept her heart in reasonable harmony with her intelligence.

As a practical manager she was admirable. Her husband, who fortunately died early, was a spendthrift. So was her son, and her daughter not much better. But the wife and mother knew the excellent utility of money, watched carefully her great estate, scolded her agents, spent largely when she could, and when she could not, went without. She accuses herself of avarice, as the avaricious never do. But we know that she was prudent, and forethoughtful, and discreet.

I am sure, also, that she was perfect mistress of her household. But it is a strange thing that a woman, writing a thousand of the frankest long letters, should say scarcely a word about her servants. Could you imitate her, madam? And do you not agree with me that it is an indication of strong sense and native tact?

Let us trace further the charming many-sidedness of this beautifully rounded character. She was a Parisian, a child of brick and mortar, her ears well tuned to the hubbub of city streets, yet she loved the country, not for hasty week-ends of dress and gossip, but for its real quiet and solitude. She felt its melancholy. “In these woods reveries sometimes fall upon me so black that I come out of them as if I had had a touch of fever.” And when she rambles under the shade of melancholy boughs, with Madame de La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld, whose company one would not have supposed exhilarating, their conversations are “so dismal that you would think there was nothing else to do but bury us.” Yet the quick, sweet reaction of her sunny temper shows in the very next sentence. “Madame de La Fayette’s garden is the loveliest thing in the world. It is all flowers, all sweetness.”

She herself assures her friends that they need not fear that country solitude will bore her and make her morbid. “Except for pangs of heart, against which I am too weak, there is nothing to pity me for. I am naturally happy and get on with everything and am amused with everything.” So, if the song of a nightingale could fill her eyes with tears, in another instant, like the merry Phædria, she could “laugh at shaking of the leaves light.” It is she who invented that exquisite spring phrase, “the singing woods,” she who calls herself “lonely as a violet, easy to be hid,” she who knows the love of mute insensate things, “I understand better than any one in the world the sort of attachment one has for inanimate objects.” How fresh and charming is the picture of her wading in the morning dew up to her knees to take an eager survey of her open-air possessions.

With that other joy of solitude, books, she is as engaging and as frank as with the natural world. It would be absurd to think of her as a pedant, or a blue-stocking. Any call of the normal feminine pursuits of life found her quickly and readily responsive, her best books cast into a corner, forgotten. Yet she did love them. “When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.” She can pass long hours wholly absorbed in new authors, or old ones. Her comments on the great French literature that was springing up about her are always fresh, shrewd, and suggestive. Of Racine’s religious plays she says, “Racine has outdone himself; he loves God as he loved his mistresses; he enters into sacred things as he did into profane.” La Fontaine she prized as one born under the same planet. He was gay like her, tender like her, loved the birds and flowers like her, and like her, kept his tears in the closest contact with his laughter. I feel a certain yearning in the words with which she socially condemns the wayward poet. “You can only thank God for such a man and pray to have nothing to do with him.”

But novels, novels! Assuredly no one ever loved them more than Madame de Sévigné, those interminable ten-volume romances of chivalry and sentiment which she pored over, as later generations pored over Richardson, or Scott, or Dumas, or Victor Hugo. No one has ever expressed more vivaciously than she the fascination we feel in these books, even when our cooler judgment laughs at them: “The style of La Calprenède is wretched in a thousand places: the swelling romantic phrases, the ill-assorted words, I feel them all. I admit that such language is detestable, and all the time the book holds me like glue. The beauty of the sentiments, the violence of the passions, the great scale of the incidents, and the miraculous success of the hero’s redoubtable sword—it sweeps me away as if I were a girl again.”