She hears that son of hers read “some chapters out of Rabelais,” “which were enough,” she declares, “to make us die with laughing.” “I cannot affect,” she says, “a prudery which is not natural to me.” No, indeed, a prude this woman was not. She had the strong æsthetic stomach of her time. It is queer to have Rabelais rubbing cheek and jowl with Nicole (“We are going to begin a moral treatise of Nicole’s”), a severe Port-Royalist, in one and the same letter. But this is French; above all, it is Madame de Sévigné. By the way, she and her friends, first and last, “die” a thousand jolly deaths “with laughing.”
A contemporary allusion to “Tartuffe,” with more French manners implied:
The other day La Biglesse played Tartuffe to the life. Being at table, she happened to tell a fib about some trifle or other, which I noticed, and told her of it; she cast her eyes to the ground, and with a very demure air, “Yes, indeed, madam,” said she, “I am the greatest liar in the world; I am very much obliged to you for telling me of it.” We all burst out a-laughing, for it was exactly the tone of Tartuffe—“Yes, brother, I am a wretch, a vessel of iniquity.”
M. de la Rochefoucauld appears often by name in the letters. Here he appears anonymously by his effect:
“Warm affections are never tranquil;” a maxim.
Not a very sapid bit of gnomic wisdom, certainly. We must immediately make up to our readers, on Madame de Sévigné’s behalf, for the insipidity of the foregoing “maxim” of hers, by giving here two or three far more sententious excerpts from the letters, excerpts collected by another:
There may be so great a weight of obligation that there is no way of being delivered from it but by ingratitude.
Long sicknesses wear out grief, and long hopes wear out joy.
Shadow is never long taken for substance; you must be, if you would appear to be. The world is not unjust long.
Madame de Sévigné makes a confession which will comfort readers who may have experienced the same difficulty as that of which she speaks: