In French history,—we may say, in the history of the world,—if there are few brighter, there also are few purer, fames than the fame of Pascal.
IX.
MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ.
1626-1696.
Of Madame de Sévigné, if it were permitted here to make a pun and a paradox, one might justly and descriptively say that she was not a woman of letters, but only a woman of—letters. For Madame de Sévigné's addiction to literature was not at all that of an author by profession. She simply wrote admirable private letters, in great profusion, and became famous thereby.
Madame de Sévigné's fame is partly her merit, but it is also partly her good fortune. She was rightly placed to be what she was. This will appear from a sketch of her life, and still more from specimens to be exhibited of her own epistolary writing.
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was her maiden name. She was born a baroness. She was married, young, a marchioness. First early left an orphan, she was afterward early left a widow,—not too early, however, to have become the mother of two children, a son and a daughter. The daughter grew to be the life-long idol of the widowed mother's heart. The letters she wrote to this daughter, married, and living remote from her, compose the greater part of that voluminous epistolary production by which Madame de Sévigné became, without her ever aiming at such a result, or probably ever thinking of it, one of the classics of the French language.
Madame de Sévigné was wealthy as orphan heiress, and she should have been wealthy as widow. But her husband was profligate, and he wasted her substance. She turned out to be a thoroughly capable woman of affairs who managed her property well. During her long and stainless widowhood—her husband fell in a shameful duel when she was but twenty-five years old, and she lived to be seventy—she divided her time between her estate, The Rocks, in Brittany, and her residence in Paris. This period was all embraced within the protracted reign of Louis XIV., perhaps, upon the whole, the most memorable age in the history of France.
Beautiful, and, if not brilliantly beautiful, at least brilliantly witty, Madame de Sévigné was virtuous—in that chief sense of feminine virtue—amid an almost universal empire of profligacy around her. Her social advantages were unsurpassed, and her social success was equal to her advantages. She had the woman courtier's supreme triumph in being once led out to dance by the king—her own junior by a dozen years—no vulgar king, remember, but the "great" Louis XIV. Her cynical cousin, himself a writer of power, who had been repulsed in dishonorable proffers of love by the young marchioness during the lifetime of her husband,—we mean Count Bussy,—says, in a scurrilous work of his, that Madame de Sévigné remarked, on returning to her seat after her dancing-bout with the king, that Louis possessed great qualities, and would certainly obscure the lustre of all his predecessors. "I could not help laughing in her face," the ungallant cousin declared, "seeing what had produced this panegyric." Probably, indeed, the young woman was pleased. But, whatever may have been her faults or her follies, nothing can rob Madame de Sévigné of the glory that is hers, in having been strong enough in womanly and motherly honor to preserve, against many dazzling temptations, amid general bad example, and even under malignant aspersions, a chaste and spotless name. When it is added, that, besides access to the royal court itself, this gifted woman enjoyed the familiar acquaintance of La Rochefoucauld and other high-bred wits, less famous, not a few, enough will have been said to show that her position was such as to give her talent its best possible chance. The French history of the times of Louis XIV. is hinted in glimpses the most vivid and the most suggestive, throughout the whole series of the letters.