Delicious is the word her friends most often use of her. “Your letters are delicious and so are you,” writes one of them. “She was delicious to live with,” said another. And her son-in-law, with whom she had sharp spats at times, yet declared that “delicious” was the true name for her society.
The fact is, she loved to be with men and women, and therefore they loved to be with her. Being flesh and blood, she sometimes tired of the invitations and festivities that were thrust upon her. There were receptions and entertainments without end, court functions and private functions. “I wish with all my soul I were out of here where they honor me too much. I am hungry for privation and silence.” And again, when the courtesies rained as thickly as blossoms in May, and tired nerves rebelled against late eating sauced with interminable chatter, “When, when can I die of hunger and keep still?” Also, being a creature of petulant wit, she could not fail occasionally to find average humanity—that is, you and me—somewhat tedious.
Yet she makes the best, even of such tediousness, in her kindly, human way, and turns it into gentle pleasantry. After all, she argues, it is much better to mix with bad company than good. Why? Because when the bad leaves you, you are not a bit sorry. But parting with those whose society is delightful leaves you utterly at a loss how to resume the common life of every day. Does not this last touch of hers recall many a poignant minute of your own? This is what makes Madame de Sévigné so charming, that in giving perfect expression to every shade of her feeling she is finding immortal utterance for your feelings and for mine. “Sometimes I am seized with the fancy to cry at a great ball, and sometimes I give way to my fancy, without any one’s ever knowing it.”
Crying or laughing, she went to balls and banquets, and enjoyed them, and described them with the golden glow of her decorative imagination. “I went to the marriage of Mademoiselle de Louvois. What shall I say about it? Magnificence, gorgeousness, all France, garments loaded and slashed with gold, jewels, a blaze of fires and flowers, a jam of coaches, cries in the street, torches flaring, poor folk thrust back and run over; in short, the usual whirlwind of nothing, questions not answered, compliments not meant, civilities addressed to no one in particular, everybody’s feet tangled up in everybody’s train.” And she went home weary and resolved not to go again. And she went again—like all of us.
It will naturally be asked whether, in an age of too courtly morals, when exact virtue was not always insisted upon, perhaps not even expected, this gay young widow lived within the limits of propriety. It can only be said that the keenest scandal-mongers of the time—and none were ever keener—find no fault with her in this respect. She had passionate lovers of all sorts, princes, generals, statesmen, poets. She laughed with them all, picked the fine flower of their adoration, and went on her way untouched, so far as it appears. What the passions were she knew well, as is shown clearly enough in the wonderful sentence in which she compares them to vipers, which may be bruised and crushed and torn and trampled, and still they move; you may tear their hearts out, and still they move. But for her own, she flourished in spite of them, not perhaps with white innocence, but with royal self-possession.
And this self-possession was not wholly the outcome of coldness, nor even of balanced sanity. A large amount of spiritual elevation entered into it, a religious fervor which, if not always haunting, is rarely far away. Madame de Sévigné took nice and constant counsel for the welfare of her soul. With all her ample sense of the charm and solace of this world, she was very much alive to the awful immanence of another. Time flies, she says, “and I see it fly with horror, bringing me hideous old age, disease, and death.” Again, “I find death so terrible, that I hate life more because it brings me to it than because of the thorns that strew the path.” She assuages the horror with devout practice. On suitable occasions she resolves to withdraw from the world, pray and fast much, and “practice boredom for the love of God.” She is a faithful and constant reader of the fathers and the moralists. She listens to the great sermons of Bossuet and Bordaloue, and profits, though her shrewd wit is sometimes critical. Above all, she strives for a humble, earnest attitude of submission to the will of God everywhere and always. Without this, she thinks, life would be unbearable. The sense of His presence and of His guidance, the solution of sin and suffering by His all-controlling and all-loving will are never far from her. At moments she even rises to something of the mystic’s joy.
Yet she was no mystic, but in this aspect of life also a sane and normal woman, and it is delicious, because so human, to see how the pressure of this world returns upon her and crowds out even God. How charming is her naïve report of the verdict of a suggested confessor. “I have seen the Abbé de la Vergne; we talked about my soul; he says that unless he can lock me up, not stir a step from me, take me to and from church himself, and neither let me read, speak, nor hear a single thing, he will have nothing to do with me whatever.” The saints, the saints! She envies them, of course. But they are so dowdy. The sinners are so much more agreeable. And the ways of this world are pleasant, pleasant. Dark thoughts, dark hours will intrude, will overcome us like a summer cloud, and then we get out Pascal or Nicole and hurry to the altar. But who can live on this level long? Yes, she is mean and low and base, she says. When she sees people too happy it fills her with despair, which is not the fashion of a beautiful soul. She is not a beautiful soul, calls herself a soul of mud. How can any prayer, or any religion, or any God save her?
She has her moments, also, not of defiance, but of question whether it is worth while to make one’s self unhappy. “You must love my weaknesses, my faults,” she says. “For my part I put up with them well enough.” After all, if she is lukewarm, and easy-going, and forgetful, so are others, millions of others. Why should she suffer for it more than they? We practice salvation with the saints, she says, and damnation with the children of this world. “We are not the devil’s,” she says, “because we fear God and because at bottom we have a touch of religion. We are not God’s, either, because His law is hard and we do not wish to do ourselves a damage. This is the state of the lukewarm, and the great number of them does not disturb me. I enter perfectly into their reasons. At the same time God hates them and they ought to escape from their condition; but this is precisely the difficulty.”
No one has portrayed more exquisitely than she the pitiful but human lightness of common souls in face of these enormous questions. “My saintly friend sometimes finds me as reasonable and serious as she would have me. And then, a whiff of spring air, a ray of sunshine, sweeps away all the reflections of the twilight gloom.” And it is she who framed the advice, dangerous or precious according to the heart it falls on. “Il faut glisser sur les pensées et ne pas les approfondir.” It is sometimes best to slip over thoughts and not go to the bottom of them.
So we have seen Madame de Sévigné to be in every respect a sweetly rounded nature, one of the most so, one of the most sane, normal, human women that have left the record of their souls for the careful study of posterity. Well, in this pure and perfect crystal of balanced common sense and judgment there was one most curious and interesting flaw, the lady’s love for her daughter. Love for her daughter? you repeat. And is not that the most sane and normal of all possible characteristics in a woman?