e more
because it leads me thereto, than because of the thorns with which
it is planted. You will say that I want to live forever, then; not at
all; but, if my opinion had been asked, I would have preferred to die
in my nurse's arms; that would have removed me from the vexations of
spirit and would have given me heaven full surely and easily."

Mme. de Sevigne never bored her readers with her own reflections. She
differed from her contemporaries, who seemed to be dead to nature's
beauty, in her striking descriptions of nature. A close observer, she
knew how to describe a landscape; animating and enlivening it, and
making it talk, she inspired the reader with love of it.

"I am going to be alone and I am very glad. Provided they do not take
away from me the charming country, the shore of the Allier, the woods,
streams, and meadows, the sheep and goats, the peasant girls who dance
the _bourree_ in the fields, I consent to say adieu; the country alone
will cure me.... I have come here to end the beautiful days and to say
adieu to the foliage--it is still on the trees, it has only changed
color; instead of being green, it is golden, and of so many golden
tints that it makes a brocade of rich and magnificent gold, which we
are likely to find more beautiful than the green, if only it were not
for the changing part."

If the style of her letters did not make her the greatest prose writer
of her time, it certainly entitled her to rank as one of the most
original. The prose of the seventeenth century lacked "easy suppleness
in lively movement, and imagination in the expression"--two qualities
which Mme. de Sevigne possessed in a high degree. The slow and grave
development, the just and harmonious equilibrium, the amplitude, are
in her supplanted by a quick, alert, and free _saillie_; the detail
and marvellous exactness are enriched by color, abundance of imagery,
and metaphors. M. Faguet says she is to prose what La Fontaine is to
poetry.

The literary style of Mme. de Sevigne is not learned, studied, nor
labored. In an epoch in which the language was already formed, she did
what Montaigne did a century before, when, we may almost assert, he
had to create the French language. Her most striking expressions are
her own--newly coined, not taken from the vocabulary in usage. Her
style cannot be duplicated, and for this reason she has few imitators.
Her letters show that they were improvised--her pen doing, alone, the
work over