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Madame de Sevigne: A Life and Letters
This biography of Mme de Sevigne brings to life the world of seventeenth-century France, a mother and her daughter, a writer and her brilliant letters. The passion and the pathos of this correspondence brings us as close as we can come to the mind of a woman in the court of Louis XIV.
538 pages, Paperback
First published September 12, 1983
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 8, 2014
Too damn long and redundant without the ethnographic lens which might have made it fascinating and revelatory. A missed opportunity to bring to life and personify a signal period in European history.
Mme de Sevigne, the proto-helicopter, over-invested mother who accorded to her daughter every atom of her love, passion, concern, adoration, advice, criticism, obsession and pleas for returned favors.
I was most interested in those excerpts of the letters that gave us a feel for the France of Louis XIV and would have appreciated more author insight into the larger cultural and social norms that underscored such observations. Overall I was pretty disappointed in this as it left me wondering why there is such acclaim for the letters of Mme de Sevigne. It could have been so very much more, and with less.
There were some simply marvelous and memorable quotes amid the ceaseless declarations of daughter-adoration:
On wisdom(?) with age: "If I could only live to be two hundred I would become the most exemplary person in the world! I am pretty good at self-improvement, and find that as I grow older, I am even better at it."
Advice from Mme de Sevigne, "...try, my child, to accommodate yourself a little more to what is not really bad, to be tolerant of mediocrity, to be grateful for that which is not totally ridiculous."
The lovelorn son, "His soul of made of mush, his body of wet paper; and his heart is a like a pumpkin fricasseed in snow."
"My son writes me a great deal of foolishness: he tells me that one side of him adores me, while another side would like to strangle me, and there was a struggle to the death between the two sides..."
Mme de Sevigne, the proto-helicopter, over-invested mother who accorded to her daughter every atom of her love, passion, concern, adoration, advice, criticism, obsession and pleas for returned favors.
I was most interested in those excerpts of the letters that gave us a feel for the France of Louis XIV and would have appreciated more author insight into the larger cultural and social norms that underscored such observations. Overall I was pretty disappointed in this as it left me wondering why there is such acclaim for the letters of Mme de Sevigne. It could have been so very much more, and with less.
There were some simply marvelous and memorable quotes amid the ceaseless declarations of daughter-adoration:
On wisdom(?) with age: "If I could only live to be two hundred I would become the most exemplary person in the world! I am pretty good at self-improvement, and find that as I grow older, I am even better at it."
Advice from Mme de Sevigne, "...try, my child, to accommodate yourself a little more to what is not really bad, to be tolerant of mediocrity, to be grateful for that which is not totally ridiculous."
The lovelorn son, "His soul of made of mush, his body of wet paper; and his heart is a like a pumpkin fricasseed in snow."
"My son writes me a great deal of foolishness: he tells me that one side of him adores me, while another side would like to strangle me, and there was a struggle to the death between the two sides..."
February 24, 2020
Certainly not a page turner, yet I could not resist continuing to read letter after letter, date after date, intertwining event after event among the lives all of the friends and family of the brilliant, humorous, entertaining, well-educated Marie Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné. In a time where written letters are unknown, their place in a gentile society not understood, it would be difficult for our millennials to imagine a world where letters were the only manner of communication at a distance. In addition, the demand at that time for a society of very polite, regimented, enforced, rigid manners of seventeenth century France would be completely misunderstood. In fact, one can only enjoy this book if one is willing to enter into this (literally) foreign manner of living, in order to recreate in one's mind, or even better, to inform the visiting of historical France: Paris (including the Hôtel Carnavalet, a private residence used by the Marquise, now converted into a museum about the city of Paris, having the honored address on the Rue de Sévigné), Versailles, Les Roches in Brittany (the family estate of the Sévigné's), the Château of Grignan (the estate of the Marquise's son-in-law, that her daughter brought to gorgeous, but ruinous fruition.) [I have personally only visited the first two, the second two being far out of the usual tourist route; since I had read this book over 20 years ago, it is not until this second reading that I am challenged to go beyond my usual travel plans, bolstered by 20 more years of studying French!]
I am not a fast reader, but it seemed to me I was exceptionally slow in reading this book. Upon reflection I wondered whether it was the effect of the letters themselves, which were meant to be a treasure to savor, to read repeatedly, to be shared with friends, to be kept for safe-keeping--all representing the essence of the time and manners in which the letters were written. (Perhaps I have only been influenced by the spirited romanticism of the Madame's world view, but it is a preferable opinion to just believing that I am just slowing down with age!)
The Madame savored her life experience, finding a way to see the positive through the difficulties of life, in addition to savoring all of the lovely aspects of France at that time. Here is a selection that I found engaging: "I have managed so well that spring is here in all its beauty! Everything is green. It was no easy task to see to it that all those buds unfurled, that the red all turned to green. When I finished with all those elms, I had to go on to the beeches, then to the oaks. That is what gave me to most trouble, and I still have another week to go before I can claim to have made a perfect job of it. I begin to enjoy all the pains to which I went, and I really think that not only did I not interfere with all that beauty , but--in a pinch--I would know how to manage a springtime, on my own, so carefully did I observe, so critical an examination did I make of this one, something I had never done so meticulously before. It is my great leisure I have to thank for this opportunity and, in truth, my dear bonne [the affectionate phase that she used for her beloved daughter], it has been the most delightful experience imaginable," (p 427.)
You must persist to the end of this beloved epistolatory biography to find out how miraculous it was that these letters were ever published. In the end, it was due to the granddaughter of the Marquise, Pauline de Simiane, who inherited the actual letters that had been lovingly sequestered by her mother, Madame Françoise-Marguerite de Grignan, daughter of the Marquise. The authorized first volumes were published in 1734, thirty-eight years after her death. The reproduction of the letters was highly edited, and many of the amusing, controversial, intrusive observations, comments and opinions were eliminated. Unauthorized previous publications had begun to appear in 1725, but the origin of those letters is not known. Most of the original letters were destroyed because of the promise of Pauline de Simiane's son-in-law--on his death bed, he remembered his promise to his mother-in-law and called his cousin to bring the letters to him, where they were lit at his bedside. The only remaining letters to have survived are to Madame Guitaut, in the Archives of her Château d'Époisses, in Burgundy. Finally, in 1872 six volumes of copies of the original letters was found in a bookstore in Dijon, and bought by a professor of law, named Capmas. Consulting Sévigné scholars, they were deemed to be true copies of the original, and became the foundation for understanding how the letters had been edited over time, and could now be restored to their originator's true voice.
Needless to say, I am entranced with the history of these letters, from the inimical written gift of the author, through all of the volumes published, to this revealing biography, which includes the true historical facts of a country who soul is much beloved--that of France, itself, without which none of this histoire would exist.
I am not a fast reader, but it seemed to me I was exceptionally slow in reading this book. Upon reflection I wondered whether it was the effect of the letters themselves, which were meant to be a treasure to savor, to read repeatedly, to be shared with friends, to be kept for safe-keeping--all representing the essence of the time and manners in which the letters were written. (Perhaps I have only been influenced by the spirited romanticism of the Madame's world view, but it is a preferable opinion to just believing that I am just slowing down with age!)
The Madame savored her life experience, finding a way to see the positive through the difficulties of life, in addition to savoring all of the lovely aspects of France at that time. Here is a selection that I found engaging: "I have managed so well that spring is here in all its beauty! Everything is green. It was no easy task to see to it that all those buds unfurled, that the red all turned to green. When I finished with all those elms, I had to go on to the beeches, then to the oaks. That is what gave me to most trouble, and I still have another week to go before I can claim to have made a perfect job of it. I begin to enjoy all the pains to which I went, and I really think that not only did I not interfere with all that beauty , but--in a pinch--I would know how to manage a springtime, on my own, so carefully did I observe, so critical an examination did I make of this one, something I had never done so meticulously before. It is my great leisure I have to thank for this opportunity and, in truth, my dear bonne [the affectionate phase that she used for her beloved daughter], it has been the most delightful experience imaginable," (p 427.)
You must persist to the end of this beloved epistolatory biography to find out how miraculous it was that these letters were ever published. In the end, it was due to the granddaughter of the Marquise, Pauline de Simiane, who inherited the actual letters that had been lovingly sequestered by her mother, Madame Françoise-Marguerite de Grignan, daughter of the Marquise. The authorized first volumes were published in 1734, thirty-eight years after her death. The reproduction of the letters was highly edited, and many of the amusing, controversial, intrusive observations, comments and opinions were eliminated. Unauthorized previous publications had begun to appear in 1725, but the origin of those letters is not known. Most of the original letters were destroyed because of the promise of Pauline de Simiane's son-in-law--on his death bed, he remembered his promise to his mother-in-law and called his cousin to bring the letters to him, where they were lit at his bedside. The only remaining letters to have survived are to Madame Guitaut, in the Archives of her Château d'Époisses, in Burgundy. Finally, in 1872 six volumes of copies of the original letters was found in a bookstore in Dijon, and bought by a professor of law, named Capmas. Consulting Sévigné scholars, they were deemed to be true copies of the original, and became the foundation for understanding how the letters had been edited over time, and could now be restored to their originator's true voice.
Needless to say, I am entranced with the history of these letters, from the inimical written gift of the author, through all of the volumes published, to this revealing biography, which includes the true historical facts of a country who soul is much beloved--that of France, itself, without which none of this histoire would exist.
September 30, 2013
FROM THE SALONS TO THE BARRICADES: THE RISE OF WOMEN OF LETTERS IN WORLD LITERATURE IN THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES--MADAME DE SCUDERY, DE LA FAYETTE, DE SEVIGNE, DE STAEL, ANNE FINCH, COUNTESS OF WINCHELSEA, APHRA BEHN & MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT----FROM THE WORLD LITERATURE FORUM RECOMMENDED CLASSICS AND MASTERPIECES SERIES VIA GOODREADS—-ROBERT SHEPPARD, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Individual freedom, male or female, has in reality always been the exception rather than the rule, and in the early days of the modern world it was rather a privilige of a select few of the nobility or the richest bourgeious classes rather than a right or a reality, only later, after the French and American Revolutions broadening to include the middle and lower classes. Women, nonetheless, from the 1600's were beginning to enjoy some increasing measure of that freedom including the gradual emergence of their voice in the world of letters, starting with the priviliged women of the aristocratic classes who frequented the court "salons" and gradually broadening that voice to include larger and larger elements of the middle-classes.
As in Heian Japan with the writings of Lady Murasaki Shikibu in her "Tale of Genji," women's writing flourished in European court circles, especially in France. While the dominant aristocratic codes severely restricted women in their conduct, education and freedom to think, learn and write, yet aristocratic privilege could allow a few individual and talented women the scope for the exercise of their powers of intellect and expression. Thus the Marquise de Rambouillet opened her famous "Blue Room" salon around 1608, which was to develop over forty years into a nexus of intellectual challenge and interchange, allowing women and bourgeious intellectuals to rise to the capacity of intellectual influence and interchange once the exclusive province of aristocratic men, competing even with the royal court. There the emergent values of wit, intelligence and sensitivity came to challenge the traditional official court values of military prowess and power. Such salons continued to exercise social influence over the next two hundred years up to the French Revolution, including such later voices as Madame De Staël of the Napoleonic era. Women writers such as Madeleine de Scudéry, Madame de La Fayette, Madame de Sévigné, often referred to as the "Précieuses” or "Bluestocking" ladies of culture and refinement, became leaders and mediators of the Enlightenment and of progressive social ideas, or influential literary artists.
This movement soon spread to other nations such as England where women such as Katherine Philips, "the Matchless Orinda" and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea established coteries frequented by such writers as Swift and Pope and began to make their own voices heard. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu joined their ranks with accounts of her travels and experiences as a woman in the Ottoman court of the Grande Porte. Soon such aristocratic female voices were joined by such middle-class women as Aphra Behn, author of the novel "Oroonoko," perhaps the first professional woman writer in the English language. Thereafter, the bourgeious revolutions brought a flood of male and female writers to prominence, increasingly insisting on individual rights and individual voices, such as Tom Paine, whose "Rights of Man" attacked aristocracy and monarchy, and such female comrades at the barricades as Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley the author of "Frankenstein," wife of social reformer Richard Godwin, and author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Women," one of the seminal feminist writings of World Literature.
The influence of the increasing democratizing influence of the middle and lower classes was not, however, always a liberal one in the direction of greater freedom for either men or women. In England the middle-class revolution was often associated with the Puritan movement, which severely condemned and restricted the cultural liberties and libertinage of the aristocratic classes, denouncing their emphasis on beauty, wit, frivolity, art, sexual license and foppery in favor of a new form of repressive religious conformity, and the French Revolution, followed by the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions often imposed a revolutionary austerity and puritanism which limited the sexual freedom and individuality of both sexes.
The salon literature also included a strong element of the pastoral, the idealization of the simple life of shepherds in the countryside, often an escape from or counterbalance to the pressures and hypocrisies of urban life and the enforced conformity of court culture. This pastoral dimension, along with its "sentimental" sensibility, was also emphasized in the informal salons of Englishwomen such as Katherine Phillips, who convened their circles not in the urban capital of London but rather in the aristocratic country estates or rural England. This influence evolved further into the idealization of nature and the uncorrupted natural focus of Romanticism.
MADELINE DE SCUDERY, WRITER AND CONVERSATIONALIST OF THE GRAND SALONS
Madeleine de Scudéry (1607-1701) was part of a movement in the late Renaissance in England and France where women adapted classical rhetorical theory to their own unique conditions. She thus revised discourse to be modeled on salon conversation rather than public speaking, a forum reserved to men. Typically, he speaker in the salon built on the ideas of the speaker before them, opting for consensus rather than oppositional debate and argument. Scudéry's "Les Femmes Illustres" (1642) addressed itself to women and defends education, rather than the beauty or the cosmetic arts, as a means of social mobility for women. It justified women's participation in rhetoric and literary culture in the forms most accessible to them: salon conversation and letter writing within intellectual circles. It foregrounds women speakers as models for the speeches, including Cleopatra of Egypt. In it as well as "Conversations Sur Divers Sujets" she adapted classical rhetorical theory from Cicero, Quintilian, Aristotle, and the sophists to a theory of salon conversation and letter writing. Other works of hers such as "Conversation," "The Art of Speaking," "Raillery," "Invention," and "The Manner of Writing Letters" offered guides and models for women's intellectual and social formation while forcefully recording instances of salon conversation and social scenarios where women take intellectual control of the conversation.
In another famous work which became the basis of a popular kind of multi-party social role-playing game, "Clélie," Scudéry invented the famous "Carte de Tendre," a map of an Arcadia where the geography is all based around the theme of love: the "River of Inclination" flows past the villages of "Billet Doux" (Love Letter), "Petits Soins" (Little Trinkets) and so forth, forming a sort of board-game of love's escapades. Scudéry was a skilled conversationalist and several volumes purporting to report her conversations upon various topics were published during her lifetime.
De Scudery is also credited with establishing the genre of the "roman à clef" or "novel with a key" in which the fictional story is based on and reveals the lives of true persons in a coded fictional disguise, which the reader enjoys discovering. Most of her novels exhibited this characteristic and provided readers with great enjoyment in searching for and discovering "the key" to the hidden lives of their contemporaries. The roman à clef has since been used by writers as diverse as Victor Hugo, Phillip K. Dick, and Bret Easton Ellis.
MADAME DE LA FAYETTE, PIONEER OF THE HISTORICAL NOVEL
Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette (1634-1693), better known as Madame de La Fayette, was a French writer, the author of "La Princesse de Clèves," France's first historical novel and one of the earliest novels in World Literature. At 16, she became the maid of honor to Queen Anne of Austria and began also to acquire a literary education from the scholar Gilles Ménage, who gave her lessons in Italian and Latin. Ménage also introduced her to the fashionable salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry. There she formed a close intellectual friendship with François de La Rochefoucauld, the renown author of the sardonic "Maxims." La Fayette's most famous novel "La Princesse de Clèves," first published anonymously in March 1678 was an immense success, and is often taken to be the first true French novel and a prototype not only of the French historical novel but also of the genre of the psychological novel.The novel's action takes place between October 1558 and November 1559 at the royal court of Henry II of France. The novel recreates that era with remarkable precision. Nearly every character – except the heroine – is a true historical figure. Events and intrigues unfold with great faithfulness to documentary records. The Princess marries but falls in love with a dashing noble the Duke de Nemours, and a chain of intrigues follow giving a moving panorama of life and love at the royal court. Her life, however leads not to her lover's bed but rather to a convent.
MADAME DE SEVIGNE, ICON OF BELLE LETTRES AND EPISTOLARY PROSE
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696) was a French aristocrat, remembered especially for her exquisite prose style in letter-writing. Most of her letters, celebrated for their wit and vividness, were addressed to her daughter and gained wide circulation in literary circles. She is revered in France as one of the great icons of French literature.
Mme de Sévigné corresponded with her daughter for nearly thirty years. A clandestine edition, containing twenty-eight letters or portions of letters, was published in 1725, followed by two others the next year. Pauline de Simiane, Mme de Sévigné's granddaughter, decided to officially publish her grandmother's correspondence and working with the editor Denis-Marius Perrin of Aix-en-Provence, she published 614 letters from 1734-1737, then 772 letters in 1754. The letters were selected according to Mme de Simiane's instructions: she rejected those that dealt too closely with family matters, or those that seemed poorly written. Mme de Sévigné's letters play an important role in the novel "À la recherche du temps perdu" In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust where they figure as the favorite reading of the narrator's grandmother, and, following her death, his mother.
ANNE FINCH, COUNTESS OF WINCHELSEA---"THE MATCHLESS ORINDA"
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), was an English poetess who became known by her nom de plume, as "The Matchless Orinda." She was well-educated as her family believed in good education for girls as well as for boys. She became one of six maids of honour to Mary of Modena, who was the wife of James, Duke of York, who would later become King James II. In addition to her writing, Finch was renown for introducing and adapting the French institution of the literary salon to the English environment, often focused on an aristocratic lady's country home rather than city residence.
Finch’s range as a writer was vast and she experimented with the poetic traditions of her day, often straying from the fold through her use of rhyme, meter and content, which ranged from the simplistic to the metaphysical. Additionally, Finch wrote several satiric vignettes modelled after the short tales of French fable writer Jean de La Fontaine. Her poetry is often considered to fall in the category of Augustan, reflecting upon nature and finding both an emotional and religious relationship to it in her verse.
APHRA BEHN, THE FIRST WOMAN PROFESSIONAL WRITER IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration, the first English professional female literary writer, and author of the novel "Oroonoko" depicting the tragedy of an African prince shipped to South America as a black slave. It is notable for its exploration of slavery, race, and gender early in history. Her writing also contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature and along with Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, she was sometimes referred to as part of "The fair triumvirate of wit." She was of modest middle-class origin and traveled in South America and Europe. She is reported to have served as a spy for the Stuart King Charles II. Her political sympathies were conservative, Catholic-sympathetic, Stuart royalist and Tory. Monetary necessity compelled her to write, and her success at it in both plays and prose enabled her to become the first example of a professional woman writer in England and a model and hero for future women such as Virginia Woolf who wrote in "A Room of One's Own:"
"All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds... Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind but was of practical importance."
MADAME DE STAEL, ICON OF EUROPEAN ROMANTICISM
Madame de Staël, was a French woman of letters of Swiss origin whose lifetime overlapped with the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. She was one of Napoleon's principal opponents. Celebrated for her conversational eloquence, she participated actively in the political and intellectual life of her times. Her works, both critical and fictional, made their mark on the history of European Romanticism. Her father was the prominent Swiss banker and statesman Jacques Necker, who was the Director of Finance under King Louis XVI of France. Her mother was Suzanne Curchod, hostess of one of the most popular salons of Paris, where figures such as Buffon, Marmontel, Grimm, Edward Gibbon, the Abbé Raynal, and Jean-François de la Harpe were frequent guests. Her mother habitually brought her as a young child to sit at her feet in her famous salon, where the sober intellectuals took pleasure in stimulating the brilliant child. This exposure occasioned, as in the case of another child prodigy, John Stuart Mill, a breakdown in adolescence, but the seeds of a literary vocation had been sown irrevocably. She married the Swedish ambassador to the French royal court, a fact which gave her both a high status in French society as well as valuable diplomatic immunity during the excesses of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
At the time of the French Revolution she was enthusiastic for a mixture of Rousseauism and constitutionalism in politics, favoring an American-style constitutional republic or limited constitutional monarchy and democracy like England. Her novels were bestsellers and her literary criticism was highly influential. When she was allowed to live in Paris she greatly encouraged any political dissident from Louis's regime. She exulted in the meeting of the
Estates General at the beginning of the Revolution. In the early days of the revolutionary period she was in Paris taking an interest in, and attending the Assembly, and holding a salon on the Rue du Bac, attended by Talleyrand, Abbé Delille, Clermont-Tonnerre, and Gouverneur Morris. Napoleon said about her, that she "teaches people to think who never thought before, or who had forgotten how to think." Nonetheless she became a bitter opponent of Napoleon, leading him to order her exile from Paris, commanding she not come within 40 leagues of the city, causing her to seek exile in Germany and across Europe.
Auguste Comte included Madame de Staël in his Calendar of Great Men. In a book with the same name, Comte's disciple Frederic Harrison wrote about Staël and her works: "In Delphine a woman, for the first time since the Revolution, reopened the romance of the heart which was in vogue in the century preceding. Comte would daily recite the sentence from Delphine, "There is nothing real in the world but love." "Our thoughts and our acts," she said, "can only give us happiness through results: and results are not often in our own control. Feeling is entirely within our power; and it gives us a direct source of happiness, which nothing outside can take away." The famous quote, "Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent", commonly translated as "To know all is to forgive all", is found in her most famous novel "Corinne." Her works, Harrison wrote, "precede the works of Scott, Byron, Shelley, and partly of Chateaubriand, their historical importance is great in the development of modern Romanticism, of the romance of the heart, the delight in nature, and in the art, antiquities, and history of Europe."
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, ADVOCATE OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN AND MOTHER OF MARY SHELLEY, AUTHOR OF "FRANKENSTEIN"
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.
She, like Tom Paine travelled to France at the beginning of the Revolution and took part in its events. She published numerous books including "Thoughts on the Education of Daughters" (1787) and her children's book "Original Stories from Real Life" (1788). Later she married the philosopher and pioneer of modern anarchist thought Richard Godwin, with whom she had a daughter who would become a famous author, Mary Shelley, author of the novel "Frankenstein" and wife of Percy Shelley, the renown Romantic poet and revolutionary thinker. She died from complications of childbirth resulting from the birth of Mary, whom Godwin raised and educated. Her reputation suffered discrediting during the conservative Victorian period, but her life and works were re-evaluated upwards with the growth of the modern feminist movement in the 20th Century.
SPIRITUS MUNDI AND WOMEN OF LETTERS
My own work, "Spiritus Mundi" draws on the models of many women writers, including George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and many others. One of its main characters is Eva Strong, who is a writer, lover of the protagonist Sartorius, and an activist in the global campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, a new organ of the United Nations modeled on the European Parliament for global democracy.
World Literature Forum invites you to check out the great Women of Letters in World Literature, and also the contemporary epic novel Spiritus Mundi, by Robert Sheppard. For a fuller discussion of the concept of World Literature you are invited to look into the extended discussion in the new book Spiritus Mundi, by Robert Sheppard, one of the principal themes of which is the emergence and evolution of World Literature:
For Discussions on World Literature and n Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycrit...
Robert Sheppard
Editor-in-Chief
World Literature Forum
Author, Spiritus Mundi Novel
Author’s Blog: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpr...
Spiritus Mundi on Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17...
Spiritus Mundi on Amazon, Book I: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGO
Spiritus Mundi, Book II: The Romance http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CGM8BZG
Copyright Robert Sheppard 2013 All Rights Reserved
Individual freedom, male or female, has in reality always been the exception rather than the rule, and in the early days of the modern world it was rather a privilige of a select few of the nobility or the richest bourgeious classes rather than a right or a reality, only later, after the French and American Revolutions broadening to include the middle and lower classes. Women, nonetheless, from the 1600's were beginning to enjoy some increasing measure of that freedom including the gradual emergence of their voice in the world of letters, starting with the priviliged women of the aristocratic classes who frequented the court "salons" and gradually broadening that voice to include larger and larger elements of the middle-classes.
As in Heian Japan with the writings of Lady Murasaki Shikibu in her "Tale of Genji," women's writing flourished in European court circles, especially in France. While the dominant aristocratic codes severely restricted women in their conduct, education and freedom to think, learn and write, yet aristocratic privilege could allow a few individual and talented women the scope for the exercise of their powers of intellect and expression. Thus the Marquise de Rambouillet opened her famous "Blue Room" salon around 1608, which was to develop over forty years into a nexus of intellectual challenge and interchange, allowing women and bourgeious intellectuals to rise to the capacity of intellectual influence and interchange once the exclusive province of aristocratic men, competing even with the royal court. There the emergent values of wit, intelligence and sensitivity came to challenge the traditional official court values of military prowess and power. Such salons continued to exercise social influence over the next two hundred years up to the French Revolution, including such later voices as Madame De Staël of the Napoleonic era. Women writers such as Madeleine de Scudéry, Madame de La Fayette, Madame de Sévigné, often referred to as the "Précieuses” or "Bluestocking" ladies of culture and refinement, became leaders and mediators of the Enlightenment and of progressive social ideas, or influential literary artists.
This movement soon spread to other nations such as England where women such as Katherine Philips, "the Matchless Orinda" and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea established coteries frequented by such writers as Swift and Pope and began to make their own voices heard. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu joined their ranks with accounts of her travels and experiences as a woman in the Ottoman court of the Grande Porte. Soon such aristocratic female voices were joined by such middle-class women as Aphra Behn, author of the novel "Oroonoko," perhaps the first professional woman writer in the English language. Thereafter, the bourgeious revolutions brought a flood of male and female writers to prominence, increasingly insisting on individual rights and individual voices, such as Tom Paine, whose "Rights of Man" attacked aristocracy and monarchy, and such female comrades at the barricades as Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley the author of "Frankenstein," wife of social reformer Richard Godwin, and author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Women," one of the seminal feminist writings of World Literature.
The influence of the increasing democratizing influence of the middle and lower classes was not, however, always a liberal one in the direction of greater freedom for either men or women. In England the middle-class revolution was often associated with the Puritan movement, which severely condemned and restricted the cultural liberties and libertinage of the aristocratic classes, denouncing their emphasis on beauty, wit, frivolity, art, sexual license and foppery in favor of a new form of repressive religious conformity, and the French Revolution, followed by the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions often imposed a revolutionary austerity and puritanism which limited the sexual freedom and individuality of both sexes.
The salon literature also included a strong element of the pastoral, the idealization of the simple life of shepherds in the countryside, often an escape from or counterbalance to the pressures and hypocrisies of urban life and the enforced conformity of court culture. This pastoral dimension, along with its "sentimental" sensibility, was also emphasized in the informal salons of Englishwomen such as Katherine Phillips, who convened their circles not in the urban capital of London but rather in the aristocratic country estates or rural England. This influence evolved further into the idealization of nature and the uncorrupted natural focus of Romanticism.
MADELINE DE SCUDERY, WRITER AND CONVERSATIONALIST OF THE GRAND SALONS
Madeleine de Scudéry (1607-1701) was part of a movement in the late Renaissance in England and France where women adapted classical rhetorical theory to their own unique conditions. She thus revised discourse to be modeled on salon conversation rather than public speaking, a forum reserved to men. Typically, he speaker in the salon built on the ideas of the speaker before them, opting for consensus rather than oppositional debate and argument. Scudéry's "Les Femmes Illustres" (1642) addressed itself to women and defends education, rather than the beauty or the cosmetic arts, as a means of social mobility for women. It justified women's participation in rhetoric and literary culture in the forms most accessible to them: salon conversation and letter writing within intellectual circles. It foregrounds women speakers as models for the speeches, including Cleopatra of Egypt. In it as well as "Conversations Sur Divers Sujets" she adapted classical rhetorical theory from Cicero, Quintilian, Aristotle, and the sophists to a theory of salon conversation and letter writing. Other works of hers such as "Conversation," "The Art of Speaking," "Raillery," "Invention," and "The Manner of Writing Letters" offered guides and models for women's intellectual and social formation while forcefully recording instances of salon conversation and social scenarios where women take intellectual control of the conversation.
In another famous work which became the basis of a popular kind of multi-party social role-playing game, "Clélie," Scudéry invented the famous "Carte de Tendre," a map of an Arcadia where the geography is all based around the theme of love: the "River of Inclination" flows past the villages of "Billet Doux" (Love Letter), "Petits Soins" (Little Trinkets) and so forth, forming a sort of board-game of love's escapades. Scudéry was a skilled conversationalist and several volumes purporting to report her conversations upon various topics were published during her lifetime.
De Scudery is also credited with establishing the genre of the "roman à clef" or "novel with a key" in which the fictional story is based on and reveals the lives of true persons in a coded fictional disguise, which the reader enjoys discovering. Most of her novels exhibited this characteristic and provided readers with great enjoyment in searching for and discovering "the key" to the hidden lives of their contemporaries. The roman à clef has since been used by writers as diverse as Victor Hugo, Phillip K. Dick, and Bret Easton Ellis.
MADAME DE LA FAYETTE, PIONEER OF THE HISTORICAL NOVEL
Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette (1634-1693), better known as Madame de La Fayette, was a French writer, the author of "La Princesse de Clèves," France's first historical novel and one of the earliest novels in World Literature. At 16, she became the maid of honor to Queen Anne of Austria and began also to acquire a literary education from the scholar Gilles Ménage, who gave her lessons in Italian and Latin. Ménage also introduced her to the fashionable salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry. There she formed a close intellectual friendship with François de La Rochefoucauld, the renown author of the sardonic "Maxims." La Fayette's most famous novel "La Princesse de Clèves," first published anonymously in March 1678 was an immense success, and is often taken to be the first true French novel and a prototype not only of the French historical novel but also of the genre of the psychological novel.The novel's action takes place between October 1558 and November 1559 at the royal court of Henry II of France. The novel recreates that era with remarkable precision. Nearly every character – except the heroine – is a true historical figure. Events and intrigues unfold with great faithfulness to documentary records. The Princess marries but falls in love with a dashing noble the Duke de Nemours, and a chain of intrigues follow giving a moving panorama of life and love at the royal court. Her life, however leads not to her lover's bed but rather to a convent.
MADAME DE SEVIGNE, ICON OF BELLE LETTRES AND EPISTOLARY PROSE
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696) was a French aristocrat, remembered especially for her exquisite prose style in letter-writing. Most of her letters, celebrated for their wit and vividness, were addressed to her daughter and gained wide circulation in literary circles. She is revered in France as one of the great icons of French literature.
Mme de Sévigné corresponded with her daughter for nearly thirty years. A clandestine edition, containing twenty-eight letters or portions of letters, was published in 1725, followed by two others the next year. Pauline de Simiane, Mme de Sévigné's granddaughter, decided to officially publish her grandmother's correspondence and working with the editor Denis-Marius Perrin of Aix-en-Provence, she published 614 letters from 1734-1737, then 772 letters in 1754. The letters were selected according to Mme de Simiane's instructions: she rejected those that dealt too closely with family matters, or those that seemed poorly written. Mme de Sévigné's letters play an important role in the novel "À la recherche du temps perdu" In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust where they figure as the favorite reading of the narrator's grandmother, and, following her death, his mother.
ANNE FINCH, COUNTESS OF WINCHELSEA---"THE MATCHLESS ORINDA"
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), was an English poetess who became known by her nom de plume, as "The Matchless Orinda." She was well-educated as her family believed in good education for girls as well as for boys. She became one of six maids of honour to Mary of Modena, who was the wife of James, Duke of York, who would later become King James II. In addition to her writing, Finch was renown for introducing and adapting the French institution of the literary salon to the English environment, often focused on an aristocratic lady's country home rather than city residence.
Finch’s range as a writer was vast and she experimented with the poetic traditions of her day, often straying from the fold through her use of rhyme, meter and content, which ranged from the simplistic to the metaphysical. Additionally, Finch wrote several satiric vignettes modelled after the short tales of French fable writer Jean de La Fontaine. Her poetry is often considered to fall in the category of Augustan, reflecting upon nature and finding both an emotional and religious relationship to it in her verse.
APHRA BEHN, THE FIRST WOMAN PROFESSIONAL WRITER IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration, the first English professional female literary writer, and author of the novel "Oroonoko" depicting the tragedy of an African prince shipped to South America as a black slave. It is notable for its exploration of slavery, race, and gender early in history. Her writing also contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature and along with Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, she was sometimes referred to as part of "The fair triumvirate of wit." She was of modest middle-class origin and traveled in South America and Europe. She is reported to have served as a spy for the Stuart King Charles II. Her political sympathies were conservative, Catholic-sympathetic, Stuart royalist and Tory. Monetary necessity compelled her to write, and her success at it in both plays and prose enabled her to become the first example of a professional woman writer in England and a model and hero for future women such as Virginia Woolf who wrote in "A Room of One's Own:"
"All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds... Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind but was of practical importance."
MADAME DE STAEL, ICON OF EUROPEAN ROMANTICISM
Madame de Staël, was a French woman of letters of Swiss origin whose lifetime overlapped with the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. She was one of Napoleon's principal opponents. Celebrated for her conversational eloquence, she participated actively in the political and intellectual life of her times. Her works, both critical and fictional, made their mark on the history of European Romanticism. Her father was the prominent Swiss banker and statesman Jacques Necker, who was the Director of Finance under King Louis XVI of France. Her mother was Suzanne Curchod, hostess of one of the most popular salons of Paris, where figures such as Buffon, Marmontel, Grimm, Edward Gibbon, the Abbé Raynal, and Jean-François de la Harpe were frequent guests. Her mother habitually brought her as a young child to sit at her feet in her famous salon, where the sober intellectuals took pleasure in stimulating the brilliant child. This exposure occasioned, as in the case of another child prodigy, John Stuart Mill, a breakdown in adolescence, but the seeds of a literary vocation had been sown irrevocably. She married the Swedish ambassador to the French royal court, a fact which gave her both a high status in French society as well as valuable diplomatic immunity during the excesses of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
At the time of the French Revolution she was enthusiastic for a mixture of Rousseauism and constitutionalism in politics, favoring an American-style constitutional republic or limited constitutional monarchy and democracy like England. Her novels were bestsellers and her literary criticism was highly influential. When she was allowed to live in Paris she greatly encouraged any political dissident from Louis's regime. She exulted in the meeting of the
Estates General at the beginning of the Revolution. In the early days of the revolutionary period she was in Paris taking an interest in, and attending the Assembly, and holding a salon on the Rue du Bac, attended by Talleyrand, Abbé Delille, Clermont-Tonnerre, and Gouverneur Morris. Napoleon said about her, that she "teaches people to think who never thought before, or who had forgotten how to think." Nonetheless she became a bitter opponent of Napoleon, leading him to order her exile from Paris, commanding she not come within 40 leagues of the city, causing her to seek exile in Germany and across Europe.
Auguste Comte included Madame de Staël in his Calendar of Great Men. In a book with the same name, Comte's disciple Frederic Harrison wrote about Staël and her works: "In Delphine a woman, for the first time since the Revolution, reopened the romance of the heart which was in vogue in the century preceding. Comte would daily recite the sentence from Delphine, "There is nothing real in the world but love." "Our thoughts and our acts," she said, "can only give us happiness through results: and results are not often in our own control. Feeling is entirely within our power; and it gives us a direct source of happiness, which nothing outside can take away." The famous quote, "Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent", commonly translated as "To know all is to forgive all", is found in her most famous novel "Corinne." Her works, Harrison wrote, "precede the works of Scott, Byron, Shelley, and partly of Chateaubriand, their historical importance is great in the development of modern Romanticism, of the romance of the heart, the delight in nature, and in the art, antiquities, and history of Europe."
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, ADVOCATE OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN AND MOTHER OF MARY SHELLEY, AUTHOR OF "FRANKENSTEIN"
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.
She, like Tom Paine travelled to France at the beginning of the Revolution and took part in its events. She published numerous books including "Thoughts on the Education of Daughters" (1787) and her children's book "Original Stories from Real Life" (1788). Later she married the philosopher and pioneer of modern anarchist thought Richard Godwin, with whom she had a daughter who would become a famous author, Mary Shelley, author of the novel "Frankenstein" and wife of Percy Shelley, the renown Romantic poet and revolutionary thinker. She died from complications of childbirth resulting from the birth of Mary, whom Godwin raised and educated. Her reputation suffered discrediting during the conservative Victorian period, but her life and works were re-evaluated upwards with the growth of the modern feminist movement in the 20th Century.
SPIRITUS MUNDI AND WOMEN OF LETTERS
My own work, "Spiritus Mundi" draws on the models of many women writers, including George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and many others. One of its main characters is Eva Strong, who is a writer, lover of the protagonist Sartorius, and an activist in the global campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, a new organ of the United Nations modeled on the European Parliament for global democracy.
World Literature Forum invites you to check out the great Women of Letters in World Literature, and also the contemporary epic novel Spiritus Mundi, by Robert Sheppard. For a fuller discussion of the concept of World Literature you are invited to look into the extended discussion in the new book Spiritus Mundi, by Robert Sheppard, one of the principal themes of which is the emergence and evolution of World Literature:
For Discussions on World Literature and n Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycrit...
Robert Sheppard
Editor-in-Chief
World Literature Forum
Author, Spiritus Mundi Novel
Author’s Blog: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpr...
Spiritus Mundi on Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17...
Spiritus Mundi on Amazon, Book I: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGO
Spiritus Mundi, Book II: The Romance http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CGM8BZG
Copyright Robert Sheppard 2013 All Rights Reserved
October 10, 2019
If you ever want a glimpse into 17th century aristocratic France, reading this biography and excerpts of Madame de Sévigné’s many letters will certainly give you that. She was a prolific letter writer, and unbeknownst to her, many of her correspondences were saved, giving us a fantastic insight into the pre-revolution period of Louis XIV, albeit voyeuristically.
She’s removed from daily court life but Madame de Sévigné is high enough in French society to know the King and charm the royal court, and through her we see the corruption of absolute monarchies, even though she obsequiously writes in his favor (likely because she knew letters could be opened and read by government officials at any time). Louis XIV goes through mistresses as he wishes, with noblemen often throwing their daughters, sisters, or wives his way in the hope that they might become the new ‘Favorite’ (calling to mind the Mel Brooks characterization of Louix XVI and the line ‘It’s good to be the king’). He wastes enormous amounts of money on Versailles, and pushes to get it done so quickly that there is a “prodigious mortality rate among the workmen – cartloads of corpses carried off nightly from Versailles, as from the Charity Hospitals.” He imprisons powerful men for appearing to threaten his authority or in some other way falling out of favor (e.g. in the case of Nicolas Fouquet for building a splendid palace of his own at Vaux-le-Vicomte). He starts wars on his neighbors and sometimes adopts a scorched-earth policy, such as when he burns over 20 substantial towns like Heidelberg in 1689, which Madame de Sévigné’s grandson was a part of. He keeps the poor in misery by making them shoulder the main burden in his system of taxation, and weakens the nobility by either calling them to Paris, so that they are much less effective in running and profiting from their estates in the provinces, or forcing them into government positions in the provinces where they have to foot the bill for local armies and entertaining. It’s crystal clear to us why the French revolution 100 years later would come.
One of the interesting anecdotes Madame de Sévigné tells us about is François Vatel, an accomplished maître d'hôtel who committed suicide by running himself through with his sword propped up against a door, succeeding only on the third try, and all because he felt disgraced that seafood shipments for an important banquet were late (with the irony being that they came that same day). Another fascinating passage is about her visit to Versailles, where aside from the lavish trappings (“the furnishings are divine, utter magnificence everywhere”), we hear about the high stakes gambling, and things like going out on the canal in gondolas, accompanied by music. She also describes some of the gifts bestowed upon Louis XIV’s mistress Mme de Montespan by those trying to curry favor; in one case a magnificent chateau, and in another, a “golden crown, gold on gold, fitted over a golden brocade sheath, which was cross-woven with threads of various shades of gold – all of which adds up to the most heavenly fabric imaginable! Fairies must have woven it on some secret, mysterious loom of their own!”
Most of what we see in the book, however, is Madame de Sévigné’s family. Widowed early because her hotheaded husband got himself killed in a duel, she has two kids, a son and a daughter, but it’s the girl she loves to excess. She was devoted to her in ways which weren’t all that healthy to either of them, and which wasn’t entirely reciprocated, at least in the same way. When her daughter is married to Count Grignan who is then stationed in the Provence, Madame de Sévigné practically loses it in her grief. She pines for her in letter after letter, so much so, that I think the author, Frances Mossiker, should have trimmed some of this content down. Madame de Sévigné is correct in criticizing her daughter and son-in-law for running up massive debts gambling and living a lavish lifestyle, but she’s unbearable when she criticizes her for getting pregnant because it won’t allow them to do things together when she visits. It’s more than a little odd when she urges her 25-year-old daughter to sleep in separate beds. There is a weirdly jealous competition she has with her son-in-law for her daughter’s love, and regularly asserts that there is no love that can compete with parental love. Meanwhile, her son, a much warmer and more genuine person, gets some of her attention and love, but it pales in perspective, even though he’s off for years fighting in Louis XIV’s military campaigns.
Many have commented negatively on Madame de Sévigné’s daughter as being cold, unloving, and unworthy of her mother (in fact, the cold and intellectual daughter in Thornton Wilder’s ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey’ is modelled after her). All of that may be true, but her mother doesn’t come across as all that likeable either. Aside from the excessive mothering, she’s spoiled and mostly oblivious to the suffering of the poor, looking down on them with aristocratic disdain. As authorities descended on Brittany to quell a revolt and then began hanging people indiscriminately and randomly as well as torturing them via the wheel, she writes:
“The rebels of Rennes have fled, long since. Thus, the innocent will pay for the guilty, but I have no complaint so long as the four thousand soldiers at Rennes…do not interfere with my promenades in my forests where the trees grow marvelously tall and beautiful.”
There is a callousness here that we also in her daughter, who says loudly and often about a bourgeoisie girl she’s had to accept as a daughter-in-law (because of her own dire financial straits), that “it was necessary, from time to time, to add manure to the finest soil in the world,” and in the girl’s presence. For those same reasons she puts her oldest daughter (Madame de Sévigné’s granddaughter) in a convent at age 6, never to emerge again in life, because they are so wasteful of money that they know they won’t be able to afford a dowry, thought it apparently was a common practice for aristocratic families at the time.
Much is made of Madame de Sévigné’s beautiful letter writing, but to be honest I only got small glimpses of this and her wit in the letters that are excerpted. I hated it when Mosskier alludes to some aspect of her writing and then doesn’t quote it, and though I admire her meticulous research and scholarly approach, I sometimes felt like I was reading too much of Mossiker, and not enough Madame de Sévigné. An example of this is when she says:
“…one gathers from her letters that Madame de Sévigné faced life with all her senses open: she was enraptured by the autumnal splendor of the Livry woods, by the quality of moonlight filtering through the treetops at Les Rochers. Her descriptions of the rich, the golden butter of the Pré Valé, of the gamy orlotans and the luscious figs of Provence are mouth-watering, connotative of a supremely sensuous woman.”
And then doesn’t include the letters directly. Another is when she tells us that to keep her letters interesting when she was away from Paris and all the latest news from there, Madame de Sévigné populated them with amusing caricatures of a huge cast of people she ran across, many of whom were recurring over decades, but then says there is simply no space to include them beyond the ‘barest few’, and by that she does mean barest. Meanwhile, we get inordinate detail and quotation of her letters pining for her daughter. It’s a real disservice to what was apparently an imagination and writing style that had Virginia Woolf (among many others) saying that she would have been a great novelist in the present day. I wondered if the more interesting and evocative letters were sacrificed because the focus of the book is on biography.
Regardless, the result is that the 500+ page tome is a bit of a slog to get through. However, despite my issues with the biographer and her subject, I have to say, there is a common element of humanity in these letters which is sobering. We see the arc of this woman’s life, and even though we know that her death is coming in 1696, it still comes as a bit of a shock when we’ve read the last letter she ever wrote. She was feeling just fine at the age of 70, but then just a week later came down with a fever from which she never recovered (possibly due to something like the flu). We’ve read her letters of lamentation about the deaths of her friends that have preceded her, and we’re told by Mossiker how the lives of her family and correspondents play out. They all of course eventually die, and this little bubble of a world has completely passed on, which has a sadness to it. And, even though we see what brought on the revolution, it’s a little painful to read about the many ways her grave was desecrated in 1793.
Last little bits of constructive criticism: there are 10 photos of portraits and chateaus included, but they’re black and white and there probably should have been more, as well as a map to highlight the locations of the places Madame de Sévigné and her family stayed at or travelled along. A family tree would have been nice (though you can sketch one out as I did), and some type of note on converting the old currency amounts that are regularly thrown around (e.g. 4,000 livres in 1685) to something we can relate to would have been very helpful.
The bottom line for me is that if you’re looking to read a selection of Madame de Sévigné’s letters, you may want to poke around for alternatives before choosing this biography. Still, it’s not bad, especially if you want the full story of her life.
Quotes:
On overindulgence; I found this a little shocking as it was about her son Charles, who she openly exchanged notes with one of her friends about not having been able to perform with one of his lovers. This is in 1671, when Charles was just 23. Nine years later she will talk just as openly about a venereal disease he contracts:
“My son is not yet cured of that indisposition which makes his precious mistresses doubt his passion. He told me, yesterday evening, that during Holy Week, he had indulged in such awful debauchery that he had been overcome with dreadful disgust. He dared not think of it: it made him want to vomit. Everywhere around him, he seemed to see baskets full of breasts and thighs…baskets full of all sorts of things in such abundance that he could not get it out of his mind – nor yet can – and could not bear so much as even to look at a woman! He was like a horse to which hay had become repulsive.”
On walking at night, and the moon. This is from 1680, and one of the more poetic passages:
“The other evening, they came to me and said, ‘Madame, it is warm in the Mall; there is not so much as a breath of wind…and the moon is making magic there!’ I could not resist the temptation. I called up my infantry [her escorts], and put on a mass of bouquets, headgear and cloaks which were totally unnecessary. I went to the Mall where the air was as warm as in my chamber. I saw a thousand phantom shapes…white- and black-robed monks, gray- and white-robed nuns, sheets draped here and there, black men, men buried up against tree trunks, little men hidden so well that only their heads were showing, priests who dared not come too close. After having laughed at all those shadowy forms, and being convinced that they were what we call spirits – using our imaginations as their stage – we came back without stopping anywhere, and without having felt so much as a drop of moisture. My darling, forgive me, but I felt obliged – as did the Ancients – to pay my respects to the moon.”
She’s removed from daily court life but Madame de Sévigné is high enough in French society to know the King and charm the royal court, and through her we see the corruption of absolute monarchies, even though she obsequiously writes in his favor (likely because she knew letters could be opened and read by government officials at any time). Louis XIV goes through mistresses as he wishes, with noblemen often throwing their daughters, sisters, or wives his way in the hope that they might become the new ‘Favorite’ (calling to mind the Mel Brooks characterization of Louix XVI and the line ‘It’s good to be the king’). He wastes enormous amounts of money on Versailles, and pushes to get it done so quickly that there is a “prodigious mortality rate among the workmen – cartloads of corpses carried off nightly from Versailles, as from the Charity Hospitals.” He imprisons powerful men for appearing to threaten his authority or in some other way falling out of favor (e.g. in the case of Nicolas Fouquet for building a splendid palace of his own at Vaux-le-Vicomte). He starts wars on his neighbors and sometimes adopts a scorched-earth policy, such as when he burns over 20 substantial towns like Heidelberg in 1689, which Madame de Sévigné’s grandson was a part of. He keeps the poor in misery by making them shoulder the main burden in his system of taxation, and weakens the nobility by either calling them to Paris, so that they are much less effective in running and profiting from their estates in the provinces, or forcing them into government positions in the provinces where they have to foot the bill for local armies and entertaining. It’s crystal clear to us why the French revolution 100 years later would come.
One of the interesting anecdotes Madame de Sévigné tells us about is François Vatel, an accomplished maître d'hôtel who committed suicide by running himself through with his sword propped up against a door, succeeding only on the third try, and all because he felt disgraced that seafood shipments for an important banquet were late (with the irony being that they came that same day). Another fascinating passage is about her visit to Versailles, where aside from the lavish trappings (“the furnishings are divine, utter magnificence everywhere”), we hear about the high stakes gambling, and things like going out on the canal in gondolas, accompanied by music. She also describes some of the gifts bestowed upon Louis XIV’s mistress Mme de Montespan by those trying to curry favor; in one case a magnificent chateau, and in another, a “golden crown, gold on gold, fitted over a golden brocade sheath, which was cross-woven with threads of various shades of gold – all of which adds up to the most heavenly fabric imaginable! Fairies must have woven it on some secret, mysterious loom of their own!”
Most of what we see in the book, however, is Madame de Sévigné’s family. Widowed early because her hotheaded husband got himself killed in a duel, she has two kids, a son and a daughter, but it’s the girl she loves to excess. She was devoted to her in ways which weren’t all that healthy to either of them, and which wasn’t entirely reciprocated, at least in the same way. When her daughter is married to Count Grignan who is then stationed in the Provence, Madame de Sévigné practically loses it in her grief. She pines for her in letter after letter, so much so, that I think the author, Frances Mossiker, should have trimmed some of this content down. Madame de Sévigné is correct in criticizing her daughter and son-in-law for running up massive debts gambling and living a lavish lifestyle, but she’s unbearable when she criticizes her for getting pregnant because it won’t allow them to do things together when she visits. It’s more than a little odd when she urges her 25-year-old daughter to sleep in separate beds. There is a weirdly jealous competition she has with her son-in-law for her daughter’s love, and regularly asserts that there is no love that can compete with parental love. Meanwhile, her son, a much warmer and more genuine person, gets some of her attention and love, but it pales in perspective, even though he’s off for years fighting in Louis XIV’s military campaigns.
Many have commented negatively on Madame de Sévigné’s daughter as being cold, unloving, and unworthy of her mother (in fact, the cold and intellectual daughter in Thornton Wilder’s ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey’ is modelled after her). All of that may be true, but her mother doesn’t come across as all that likeable either. Aside from the excessive mothering, she’s spoiled and mostly oblivious to the suffering of the poor, looking down on them with aristocratic disdain. As authorities descended on Brittany to quell a revolt and then began hanging people indiscriminately and randomly as well as torturing them via the wheel, she writes:
“The rebels of Rennes have fled, long since. Thus, the innocent will pay for the guilty, but I have no complaint so long as the four thousand soldiers at Rennes…do not interfere with my promenades in my forests where the trees grow marvelously tall and beautiful.”
There is a callousness here that we also in her daughter, who says loudly and often about a bourgeoisie girl she’s had to accept as a daughter-in-law (because of her own dire financial straits), that “it was necessary, from time to time, to add manure to the finest soil in the world,” and in the girl’s presence. For those same reasons she puts her oldest daughter (Madame de Sévigné’s granddaughter) in a convent at age 6, never to emerge again in life, because they are so wasteful of money that they know they won’t be able to afford a dowry, thought it apparently was a common practice for aristocratic families at the time.
Much is made of Madame de Sévigné’s beautiful letter writing, but to be honest I only got small glimpses of this and her wit in the letters that are excerpted. I hated it when Mosskier alludes to some aspect of her writing and then doesn’t quote it, and though I admire her meticulous research and scholarly approach, I sometimes felt like I was reading too much of Mossiker, and not enough Madame de Sévigné. An example of this is when she says:
“…one gathers from her letters that Madame de Sévigné faced life with all her senses open: she was enraptured by the autumnal splendor of the Livry woods, by the quality of moonlight filtering through the treetops at Les Rochers. Her descriptions of the rich, the golden butter of the Pré Valé, of the gamy orlotans and the luscious figs of Provence are mouth-watering, connotative of a supremely sensuous woman.”
And then doesn’t include the letters directly. Another is when she tells us that to keep her letters interesting when she was away from Paris and all the latest news from there, Madame de Sévigné populated them with amusing caricatures of a huge cast of people she ran across, many of whom were recurring over decades, but then says there is simply no space to include them beyond the ‘barest few’, and by that she does mean barest. Meanwhile, we get inordinate detail and quotation of her letters pining for her daughter. It’s a real disservice to what was apparently an imagination and writing style that had Virginia Woolf (among many others) saying that she would have been a great novelist in the present day. I wondered if the more interesting and evocative letters were sacrificed because the focus of the book is on biography.
Regardless, the result is that the 500+ page tome is a bit of a slog to get through. However, despite my issues with the biographer and her subject, I have to say, there is a common element of humanity in these letters which is sobering. We see the arc of this woman’s life, and even though we know that her death is coming in 1696, it still comes as a bit of a shock when we’ve read the last letter she ever wrote. She was feeling just fine at the age of 70, but then just a week later came down with a fever from which she never recovered (possibly due to something like the flu). We’ve read her letters of lamentation about the deaths of her friends that have preceded her, and we’re told by Mossiker how the lives of her family and correspondents play out. They all of course eventually die, and this little bubble of a world has completely passed on, which has a sadness to it. And, even though we see what brought on the revolution, it’s a little painful to read about the many ways her grave was desecrated in 1793.
Last little bits of constructive criticism: there are 10 photos of portraits and chateaus included, but they’re black and white and there probably should have been more, as well as a map to highlight the locations of the places Madame de Sévigné and her family stayed at or travelled along. A family tree would have been nice (though you can sketch one out as I did), and some type of note on converting the old currency amounts that are regularly thrown around (e.g. 4,000 livres in 1685) to something we can relate to would have been very helpful.
The bottom line for me is that if you’re looking to read a selection of Madame de Sévigné’s letters, you may want to poke around for alternatives before choosing this biography. Still, it’s not bad, especially if you want the full story of her life.
Quotes:
On overindulgence; I found this a little shocking as it was about her son Charles, who she openly exchanged notes with one of her friends about not having been able to perform with one of his lovers. This is in 1671, when Charles was just 23. Nine years later she will talk just as openly about a venereal disease he contracts:
“My son is not yet cured of that indisposition which makes his precious mistresses doubt his passion. He told me, yesterday evening, that during Holy Week, he had indulged in such awful debauchery that he had been overcome with dreadful disgust. He dared not think of it: it made him want to vomit. Everywhere around him, he seemed to see baskets full of breasts and thighs…baskets full of all sorts of things in such abundance that he could not get it out of his mind – nor yet can – and could not bear so much as even to look at a woman! He was like a horse to which hay had become repulsive.”
On walking at night, and the moon. This is from 1680, and one of the more poetic passages:
“The other evening, they came to me and said, ‘Madame, it is warm in the Mall; there is not so much as a breath of wind…and the moon is making magic there!’ I could not resist the temptation. I called up my infantry [her escorts], and put on a mass of bouquets, headgear and cloaks which were totally unnecessary. I went to the Mall where the air was as warm as in my chamber. I saw a thousand phantom shapes…white- and black-robed monks, gray- and white-robed nuns, sheets draped here and there, black men, men buried up against tree trunks, little men hidden so well that only their heads were showing, priests who dared not come too close. After having laughed at all those shadowy forms, and being convinced that they were what we call spirits – using our imaginations as their stage – we came back without stopping anywhere, and without having felt so much as a drop of moisture. My darling, forgive me, but I felt obliged – as did the Ancients – to pay my respects to the moon.”
August 25, 2022
While the book is technically by Frances Mossiker, once the letters between Madame de Sévigné and her daughter begin, Mossiker becomes more of a shepherd for Sévigné's writing (providing context, providing information about a new character) and Sévigné is essentially the main writer. Which is a good thing, because while Sévigné's letters are really incredibly well written and provide a ton of fun and interesting details about her family and life among France's nobility in the 1600s, Mossiker's comments about the mother-daughter relationship are tiresome. The book could have used more court gossip, but through Sévigné's letters it provides a close look of the trials and tribulations of nobles in France when families would go bankrupt because of gambling, mismanagement, and noblesse oblige.
January 16, 2023
A nice glimpse into a life from another time. It was interesting and comforting to notice many subtle views and aspects of the story that ring true in todays society, however this put me in a slump ngl.
March 9, 2013
I think it's not the right time for me to seriously care about this wealthy woman's obsession with her daughter. I agree with the reviewer who would have liked a detached, ethnographic eye on all this wealth (a fleet of carriages conveys Madame's entourage from luxurious Paris apartment to Chateau while she agonizes about mail delivery). This would have been my second reading! Nope. Not happening. I prefer the Duc de St. Simon's gossipy, disrespectful observations of Louis XIV's court and courtiers etc. which is in fact more ethnographic.
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