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THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LILRARY

226985

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.
R 1901 L.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ.

(From the Quarterly Review, January, 1873.)

"MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ, like La Fontaine, like Montaigne, is one of those subjects which are perpetually in the order of the day in France. She is not only a classic, she is an acquaintance, and, better still, a neighbour and a friend." She will never be this, or anything like it, in England. Her name is equally familiar, almost as much a household word; and there are always amongst us a select few who find an inexhaustible source of refined enjoyment in her letters. The Horace Walpole set affected to know them by heart: George Selwyn meditated an edition of them, and preceded Lady Morgan in that pilgrimage to the Rochers which she describes so enthusiastically in her "Book of the Boudoir." Even in our time. it would have been dangerous to present oneself often at Holland House or the Berrys', without being tolerably well up in them. Mackintosh rivalled Walpole in exalting her. But the taste is not on the increase: the worshippers decline apace we hear of no recent English visitors to the Breton shrine: the famous flourish about the Grande Mademoiselle marriage, with the account of the death of Vattel, form the sum of what is

1 Madame de Sévigné: her Correspondence and Contemporaries. By the Comtesse de Puliga. 2 vols. London, 1873.

2 Sainte-Beuve, "Causeries de Lundi.”

VOL. II.

B

correctly known on this side of the Channel of her epistolary excellence: her personal history is not known at all, and maternal love is the only quality which nineteen cultivated people out of twenty could specify in illustration of her character. Yet no man or woman ever lived who was less national (in the exclusive sense) or more cosmopolitan in heart and mind, in feeling and in thought. It is not French nature, but human nature in its full breadth and variety, that she represents or typifies. Her sparkling fancy, her fine spirit of observation, her joyous confiding (and self-confiding) frankness, her utter absence of affectation, her generosity, her loyalty, her truth, are of no clime. Indeed we are by no means sure that her most sterling qualities will not just now be best understood, felt, and appreciated out of France.

Nor are the incidents with which they are mixed up, the topics which call them forth or give occasion for them, of so local and temporary a character as to repel the general reader. She is the chief chronicler of the three stirring and eventful epochs which constitute what is commonly called the age of Louis Quatorze: the choicest materials for its history are to be found in her Letters; and her private life cannot be told without connecting it, at many trying and interesting conjunctures, with the lives of her most illustrious and celebrated contemporaries. pupil of Ménage and Chapelain, the pride of the Hôtel Rambouillet, the object of vain pursuit to such men as Bussy, Conti, Fouquet, and Turenne, the friend or associate of de Retz, Rochefoucauld, Corneille, Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, Bossuet, La Grande Mademoiselle, the Scudérys, Madame la Fayette, Madame Maintenon-in short, of almost every Frenchman or Frenchwoman of

The

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