s of her family and
the saints of Port Royal.

CHAPTER VI. MADAME DE SEVIGNE

_Her Genius--Her Youth--Her unworthy Husband--Her impertinent Cousin--Her
love for her Daughter--Her Letters--Hotel de Carnavalet--Mme. Duiplessis
Guenegaud--Mme. de Coulanges--The Curtain Falls_

Among the brilliant French women of the seventeenth century, no one is
so well-known today as Mme. de Sevigne. She has not only been sung by
poets and portrayed by historians, but she has left us a complete record
of her own life and her own character. Her letters reflect every shade
of her many-sided nature, as well as the events, even the trifling
incidents, of the world in which she lived; the lineaments, the
experiences, the virtues, and the follies of the people whom she
knew. We catch the changeful tints of her mind that readily takes the
complexion of those about her, while retaining its independence; we are
made familiar with her small joys and sorrows, we laugh with her at her
own harmless weaknesses, we feel the inspiration of her sympathy,
we hear the innermost throbbings of her heart. No one was ever less
consciously a woman of letters. No one would have been more surprised
than herself at her own fame. One is instinctively sure that she would
never have seated herself deliberately to write a book of any sort
whatever. While she was planning a form for her thoughts, they would
have flown. She was essentially a woman of the great world, for which
she was fitted by her position, her temperament, her esprit, her tastes,
and her character. She loved its variety, its movement, its gaiety;
she judged leniently even its faults and its frailties. If they often
furnished a target for her wit, behind her sharpest epigrams one detects
an indulgent smile.

The natural outlet for her full mind and heart was in conversation.
When she was alone, they found vent in conversation of another sort. She
talks on paper. Her letters have the unstudied freedom, the rapidity,
the shades, the inflections of spoken words. She gives her thoughts
their own course, "with reins upon the neck," as she was fond of saying,
and without knowing where they will lead her. But it is the personal
element that inspires her. Let her heart be piqued, or touched by a
profound affection, and her mind is illuminated; her pen flies.
Her nature unveils itself, her emotions chase one another in quick
succession, her thoughts crystallize with wonderful brilliancy, and the
worl