ette was eight years younger than Mme. de Sevigne, and
died three years earlier; hence they traversed together the brilliant
world of the second half of the century of which they are among the
most illustrious representatives. The young Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La
Vergne had inherited a taste for letters and was carefully instructed by
her father, who was a field-marshal and the governor of Havre, where he
died when she was only fifteen. She had not passed the first flush of
youth when her mother contracted a second marriage with the Chevalier
Renaud de Sevigne, whose name figures among the frondeurs as the ardent
friend of Cardinal de Retz, and later among the devout Port Royalists.
It is a fact of more interest to us that he was an uncle of the Marquis
de Sevigne, and the best result of the marriage to the young girl, who
was not at all pleased and whose fortunes it clouded a little, was to
bring her into close relations with the woman to whom we owe the most
intimate details of her life.

The rare natural gifts of Mlle. De La Vergne were not left without due
cultivation. Rapin and Menage taught her Latin. "That tiresome Menage,"
as she lightly called him, did not fail, according to his custom, to
lose his susceptible heart to the remarkable pupil who, after three
months of study, translated Virgil and Horace better than her masters.
He put this amiable weakness on record in many Latin and Italian
verses, in which he addresses her as Laverna, a name more musical than
flattering, if one recalls its Latin significance. She received an
education of another sort, in the salon of her mother, a woman of much
intelligence, as well as a good deal of vanity, who posed a little as a
patroness of letters, gathering about her a circle of beaux esprits,
and in other ways signaling the taste which was a heritage from her
Provencal ancestry. On can readily imagine the rapidity with which
the young girl developed in such an atmosphere. The abbe Costar, "most
gallant of pedants and most pedantic of gallants," who had an equal
taste for literature and good dinners, calls her "the incomparable,"
sends her his books, corresponds with her, and expresses his delight at
finding her "so beautiful, so spirituelle, so full of reason." The poet
Scarron speaks of her as "toute lumineuse, toute precieuse."

The circle she met in the salon of her godmother, the Duchesse
d'Aiguillon, had no less influence in determining her future fortunes.
With