Yet though she could make such rich and ample use of the resources of nature and books in solitude, she was the last person in the world to shrink from human society. As a friend she was exquisite. She practised friendship widely, yet discreetly, as one of the most delicious arts of life. “I am nice in my friendships and it is a business in which I am sufficiently expert.” She recognized those whom she felt to be akin to her, even when she knew them but by hearsay, and she mourns over the death of a friend’s friend because she loved her, though, she says, “only by reverberation.”
She had friends of both sexes and all kinds. She was devoted alike to the magnificent Fouquet, the gay, volatile, and malicious Bussy, the brilliant, ardent Retz, the cynical La Rochefoucauld, the wise and quiet scholar, Corbinelli. It is difficult to say whether she loved most the grave, thoughtful, sentimental Madame de La Fayette, or Madame de Coulanges with whom she could play the lightest, daintiest sort of epistolary battledore and shuttlecock. So souls were honest and right-minded and of stuff to knit loyally with hers, they were all acceptable to her.
For she was beautifully, nobly, femininely loyal in all these different friendships. Perhaps the best known of her letters are those in which she relates the trial of Fouquet on charges of maladministration in his great financial office. With what passionate eagerness does she narrate every detail from day to day, the judges’ malevolence (as she views it), the varying testimony, the gradual approach of doom, and above all, the lofty, admirable bearing of the accused! With what indignant grief does she resent and resist—in spirit—the conviction and the punishment. And in lesser troubles she has the same firm fidelity. Contagious illness, what is that in a matter of friendship? “I feel about infections as you do about precipices, there are people with whom I have no fear of them.” Disagreements, controversies, quarrels?—
“To be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.”—
“In our family,” she says, of one such, “we do not lose affection. The bonds may stretch, but they never break.” And again, when she is hurt by coldness and indifference, she protests, “Ah, how easy it really is to live with me! A little gentleness, a little social impulse, a little confidence, even superficial, will lead me such a long way. I do believe that no one is more responsive than I in the daily intercourse of life.”
Yet, though she had many friends and loved them, it must not be supposed that she was love-blinded or without keen insight into folly and weakness. She was a careful observer of the facts of human nature, and could say with Pepys, whom she resembles in some points, not in others, “I confess that I am in all things curious.” Indeed, she herself remarks of one who had died in a rather unusual manner, “I perfectly understand your desire to see her. I should like to have been there myself. I love everything that is out of the common.” And a sympathetic acquaintance writes, after Madame de Sévigné’s own death: “You appear to have the taste of your late friend, who yearned for details and baptized them as ‘the style of friendship.’”
One who looked so closely into souls, and especially one who was a near friend of La Rochefoucauld, could not escape some harsh conclusions, could not avoid seeing that all is not love that speaks kindly, nor all honor that pranks itself in stately phrase. Madame de Sévigné had her moments when she lost faith in humanity, moments of despair, moments of still more melancholy mocking. When she is most touched with the spirit of her cynical associate, she writes, “We like so much to hear people talk of us and of our motives, that we are charmed even when they abuse us.” And again, “The desire to be singular and to astonish by ways out of the common seems to me to be the source of many virtues.” One day, when she was especially out of sorts, she let her quick wit amuse itself imagining what it would be to take the roof off of too many households that she knew and see inside the hate, the jealousy, the bickering, the pettiness that are veiled so carefully under the decorous fashions of the world.
Nevertheless, it would be wholly unjust to class her with La Rochefoucauld or with any one who was a cynic by permanent habit of thought. She observed men and women because she loved them. She knew that their faults were her faults and that what was good in her was to be found in them also. In no one is more obvious and unfailing the large spirit of tolerance and charity so exquisitely expressed by old Fagon, physician to King Louis the Fourteenth, “Il faut beaucoup pardonner à la nature.” It is true that her native spirit of merriment cannot resist a good joke, however it comes. “Friendship,” she says, “bids us be indignant with those who speak against our friends; but it does not forbid us to be amused when they speak wittily.” Yet she had always and everywhere that deepest and most essential element of human kindness, the faculty of putting herself in another’s place, and her sense of the laughable in trivial misfortunes was not so keen as her ready and active sympathy in great.
Therefore she was popular and widely beloved and largely sought after. In her youth and even in her later maturity she was beautiful. Precisely because her beauty was less of the features than of the expression, it lasted longer than mere pink cheeks and delicate contours. Her soul laughed in her eyes and her merry and fortunate thoughts spoke as much in her gestures and the carriage of her body as in the quick grace of her Parisian tongue. And though no human being was less vain, she no doubt knew her charm, and prized it, and cultivated it in all due and proper ways. “There is nothing so lovely as to be beautiful. Beauty is a gift of God and we should cherish it as such.”