The Letters of Madame de Sévigné by Madame de Sévigné;

First published: 1697; 1725-1726; 1734-1737; 1862-1865

Critical Evaluation:

The letters of Marie de Sévigné are thought of by many as the finest letters ever written. This large body of personal correspondence, about 1,500 letters in all, spreads over the whole of Madame de Sévigné’s adult life. The first datable letter was written in 1648 when she was twenty-two, but at least one was written before she was married. Most of the letters, however, were written between 1671 and 1696, the year of her death. In 1671, Madame de Sévigné’s recently married daughter, Francoise-Marguerite, moved to her husband’s house in the south of France, where he had been appointed to a high governmental post. This was a great disappointment to the mother who with a more than common love idolized her daughter, and who had hoped the girl would live in Paris. During the last twenty-five years of Madame de Sévigné’s life she wrote many letters to her distant daughter. Nevertheless, while most of the surviving letters are addressed to Francoise-Marguerite, a substantial number are written to Madame de Sévigné’s wide circle of friends.

Madame de Sévigné’s letters were much admired even during her lifetime; many were copied in manuscript and passed about privately in fashionable and intellectual society, but they were never published while the author was alive. However, as early as 1697, one year after Madame de Sévigné’s death, a branch of her family published its correspondence, and in this work a number of her letters were included. Then in 1725 and 1726 appeared abridged versions, and from 1734 to 1737 appeared a more complete but heavily edited edition sponsored by Madame de Sévigné’s granddaughter. Finally, between 1862 and 1865, a complete and well-edited scholarly edition of fourteen volumes was published.

At first glance, the delight we find in the letters is largely a matter of their spontaneous art, their brilliant style, and their vivid reportage of the high society of Paris during one of the greatest periods of French history. Madame de Sévigné was a member of the best society, was an excellent observer, and had a fine eye for piquant detail. Yet if all the letters had to offer was brilliant reporting they would be merely interesting, not literary masterpieces. The quality that turns this body of correspondence into literature is not so much a brilliance of style and mass of detail as it is a matter of Madame de Sévigné’s own personality and character, which are beautifully revealed, even dramatized, in letter after letter.

Madame de Sévigné was an elegant woman, a clear-sighted, well-educated, and profoundly sympathetic and humane person. Not the letters alone testify to this fact; all contemporary comment on the woman agrees that she was as attractive and pleasant as she was virtuous. And she had a certain gaiety and charm that was irrepressible even in the most adverse circumstances. She had both a generous nature and a soldily practical sense of business: her heart and her head were in admirable equilibrium. Yet, as she herself said, her head was never the dupe of her heart. These qualities were manifest in her ability, throughout her life, to state and support her opinions and sympathies while remaining tolerant of people and causes with which she disagreed. For example, while she sympathized in her younger years with the rebellious aristocrats of the Fronde, she retained the respect and friendship of her friends at court; and while she read Pascal and the Jansenist theologians with admiration, she also admired the arguments and style of their adversaries; while being perfectly orthodox in her own religious beliefs and practices, she was a friend of the reforming and austere Jansenists. Even though she was an unswerving Catholic, she found it profitable and helpful to read Protestant books.

That the letters live because of their literary and human interest is true. But their historical interest must not be minimized. In effect, Madame de Sévigné’s correspondence, particularly from 1655 to 1696, constitutes a kind of newspaper covering the court and high society in the Paris of King Louis XIV. But this record of events was not written by an outsider who observed from a distance. Madame de Sévigné was a woman of the court who participated in much of what she tells. She writes of events at the Louvre, at Versailles, at Saint-Cyr. She describes meetings with the king and his conversations. She tells of the great ladies of the time and of their salons. She has little to say about the political events and wars of the period but of important Parisian events she has much to tell us which can be found nowhere else. For example, she reports in great detail the trial and disgrace of the great Finance Minister, Foquet; the marriage of the Grande Mademoiselle; the deaths of Turenne, Conde, and Louvois.

But it is not only of Paris and the court that Madame de Sévigné speaks. After her daughter’s marriage she divided her time between the town and her country estates. Thus she often speaks of the day-to-day life of the people of both the town and the country. The common talk of the common people, and the success or lack of success of new books, what is playing at the theaters—all these things are part of her letters. She tells us about her travels, how friends are preparing a wedding, how a love affair is progressing, and what has happened to a peasant, the king’s cook, or a gardener. In speaking of these things, Madame de Sévigné is neither coy, cruel, nor free with other people’s reputations. Her object was not to gossip but to amuse and inform her daughter. Throughout the letters is seen her great maternal affection for the girl—an affection that, apparently, was not warmly responded to, and which was sometimes taken advantage of. Francoise-Marguerite was, it appears, quite spoiled.

Another interesting and revealing theme frequent in the letters is Madame de Sévigné’s feeling for nature and the countryside. It is not often thought so, but in fact the seventeenth century aristocrat spent a good deal of time on his estates; he had not yet become the courtly lap dog that he was to be in the eighteenth century. It is not surprising, then, that Madame de Sévigné, so sensitive to what happened around her, would note and record the nonhuman world and its nuances and beauties; she did so, however, with a precision that would not become usual until the early Romantic period. She speaks of the changes in the leaves, the subtle passage from one season to another, a delightful reverie under a huge tree, listening to a nightingale in the moonlight, and many other such experiences.

Finally, students will always be interested in Madame de Sévigné’s fairly frequent literary criticism. In her remarks we find two things: on the one hand we learn from this fashionable woman just what works were most admired by her age. On the other hand, we have from her an invaluable testimony to what it was that an educated, clever, and intelligent woman of the seventeenth century found at first reading to be good. This was an age when most writers about literature were academic critics who judged not like the general reader, by his tastes, but by the “rules” of neoclassical literary theory. In examining the letters, we find that Madame de Sévigné’s taste was not at all academic. She delighted in some work now largely ignored except in literary histories—the gallant novels of Mademoiselle de Scudery and the charming but shallow verse of Voiture and Benserade. However, she also saw the excellence of Corneille, Pascal, Bossuet, and La Fontaine. Typically, though she did not care for Racine as a person, she was capable of admiring certain of his works in a most enthusiastic manner.