to forgive. "A
word, a sweetness, a return, a caress, a tenderness, disarms me, cures
me in a moment," she writes. And again: "Would to God, my daughter,
that I might see you once more at the Hotel de Carnavalet, not for eight
days, nor to make there a penitence, but to embrace you and to make you
see clearly that I cannot be happy without you, and that the chagrins
which my friendship for you might give me are more agreeable than
all the false peace of a wearisome absence." In spite of these little
clouds, the old love is never dimmed; we are constantly bewildered with
the inexhaustible riches of a heart which gives so lavishly and really
asks so little for itself.

The Hotel de Carnavalet was one of the social centers of the latter part
of the century, but it was the source of no special literature and of no
new diversions. Mme. de Sevigne was herself luminous, and her fame
owes none of its luster to the reflection from those about her. She was
original and spontaneous. She read because she liked to read, and not
because she wished to be learned. She wrote as she talked, from the
impulse of the moment, without method or aim excepting to follow where
her rapid thought led her. Her taste for society was of the same order.
Her variable and sparkling genius would have broken loose from the
formal conversations and rather studied brilliancy that had charmed her
youth at the Hotel de Rambouillet. The onerous duties of a perpetual
hostess would not have suited her temperament, which demanded its hours
of solitude and repose. But she was devoted to her friends, and there
was a delightful freedom in all her intercourse with them. She has not
chronicled her salon, but she has chronicled her world, and we gather
from her letters the quality of her guests. She liked to pass an evening
in the literary coterie at the Luxembourg; to drop in familiarly upon
Mme. de La Fayette, where she found La Rochefoucauld, Cardinal de Retz,
sometimes Segrais, Huet, La Fontaine, Moliere, and other wits of the
time; to sup with Mme. de Coulanges and Mme. Scarron. She is a constant
visitor at the old Hotel de Nevers, where Marie de Gonzague and the
Princesse Palatine had charmed an earlier generation, and where Mme.
Duplessis Guenegaud, a woman of brilliant intellect, heroic courage,
large heart, and pure character, whom d'Andilly calls one of the great
souls, presided over a new circle of young poets and men of letters,
reviving the fading memories