Preface to an English translation of Mad. de Sévigné’s Letters:—
Madame de Sévigné has not yet appeared in any English dress but one which has obscured her charms; and those who have not an intimate acquaintance with her own language are as yet entire strangers to a writer the most interesting and amusing. A moderate knowledge of French, such as will enable us to read with pleasure Bossuet, Fénélon, Racine, and La Bruyère, is insufficient for the perfect comprehension of her letters, filled as they are with French idioms, allusions to proverbial expressions, to well-known passages in favourite authors, and to the historical events of the time. It is hoped that the following translation and explanatory notes will be acceptable to those who are yet unacquainted with this charming writer.
The little that can be known of her history has been so often repeated, it seems superfluous to insert it here; yet as a few of my readers may desire some information here, I will briefly mention that she was an heiress, and of a noble family; that she was born in the year 1627, and in the reign of Louis XIII.; that she married at eighteen the Marquis de Sévigné, a dissipated and profligate young man, who was killed in a duel in 1651, leaving her a widow at the age of twenty-four, with one son and one daughter; that she was adorned with beauty of the most attractive kind, and with first-rate abilities, highly improved by education; that, in spite of these dangerous gifts, she passed through the ordeal of a licentious Court with an unblemished reputation, educated her children with affection and judgment, regulated their pecuniary concerns with discretion, established them both in marriages which seem to have been honourable and happy to a degree very uncommon in her time. Anything more that is known of Mad. de Sévigné may be collected from the following letters, for her history is all domestic. It might abate the present ardour of our females in quest of notoriety, did they remark that one of those women who have obtained the highest celebrity, never sought for it, but, pursuing the quiet path of maternal affection, has, like the glowworm, involuntarily attracted admiration by her native brightness.
May I be permitted to hint to mothers, that the letters of Mad. de Sévigné are not a collection suited to extreme youth, though hitherto made a medium for learning the French language? They are unintelligible to a beginner; and if they had not this radical fault, we must still inquire whether the confidential letters of a lively communicative Parisian mother, that mother being in the centre of a corrupt court, and writing as news all the gallantries of the day, ought to enter into the studies of very young girls, however moral the writer might be in her own conduct? In short, let not Mad. de Sévigné be introduced to any one who is not of an age to appreciate her merits, and to understand from her general conduct both where she speaks ironically, and where she disapproves, though she does not happen to censure. In the present selection the passages we allude to are not introduced.
May 16, 1816, Pulteney Hotel, London.—We breathe imperial air, as we occupy a part of the hotel inhabited last year by the Russian Emperor; and the waiter assured me, with a complacent attention to my feelings, that he always wrote in the same spot that I had selected for the purpose. He does not seem to have inspired much respect; though in answer to my inquiry whether he had left the house in as dirty a state as I had heard, the waiter justified him, and said, ‘We have had others full as dirty.’
TO MRS. LEADBEATER.
Bursledon Lodge, June 14, 1816.
Deeply do I sympathize with your anxiety, and eagerly do I wish for another letter to say your dear daughter is better. Do not, I pray, delay it. There is everything in favour of her recovery, but, alas! I know how precarious the heart feels all these everythings to be when a beloved object is in question. Our fears are magnified in that case, as well as our hopes, and it is most fortunate that they bear divided sway.