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The Women of the French Salons

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Title: The Women of the French Salons

Author: Amelia Gere Mason


        
Release date: February 1, 2001 [eBook #2528]
                Most recently updated: December 20, 2013

Language: English

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THE WOMEN OF THE FRENCH SALONS

By Amelia Gere Mason




PREFACE

It has been a labor of love with many distinguished Frenchmen to recall
the memories of the women who have made their society so illustrious,
and to retouch with sympathetic insight the features which time was
beginning to dim. One naturally hesitates to enter a field that has
been gleaned so carefully, and with such brilliant results, by men
like Cousin, Sainte-Beuve, Goncourt, and others of lesser note. But the
social life of the two centuries in which women played so important a
role in France is always full of human interest from whatever point of
view one may regard it. If there is not a great deal to be said that is
new, old facts may be grouped afresh, and old modes of life and thought
measured by modern standards.

In searching through the numerous memoirs, chronicles, letters, and
original manuscripts in which the records of these centuries are hidden
away, nothing has struck me so forcibly as the remarkable mental vigor
and the far-reaching influence of women whose theater was mainly a
social one. Though society has its frivolities, it has also its serious
side, and it is through the phase of social evolution that was begun
in the salons that women have attained the position they hold today.
However beautiful, or valuable, or poetic may have been the feminine
types of other nationalities, it is in France that we find the
forerunners of the intelligent, self-poised, clear-sighted, independent
modern woman. It is possible that in the search for larger fields the
smaller but not less important ones have been in a measure forgotten.
The great stream of civilization flows from a thousand unnoted rills
that make sweet music in their course, and swell the current as surely
as the more noisy torrent. The conditions of the past cannot be revived,
nor are they desirable. The present has its own theories and its own
methods. But at a time when the reign of luxury is rapidly establishing
false standards, and the best intellectual life makes hopeless struggles
against an ever aggressive materialism, it may be profitable as well as
interesting to consider the possibilities that lie in a society equally
removed from frivolity and pretension, inspired by the talent, the
sincerity, and the moral force of American women, and borrowing a
new element of fascination from the simple and charming but polite
informality of the old salons.

It has been the aim in these studies to gather within a limited compass
the women who represented the social life of their time on its
most intellectual side, and to trace lightly their influence upon
civilization through the avenues of literature and manners. Though the
work may lose something in fullness from the effort to put so much into
so small a space, perhaps there is some compensation in the opportunity
of comparing, in one gallery, the women who exercised the greatest power
in France for a period of more than two hundred years. The impossibility
of entering into the details of so many lives in a single volume is
clearly apparent. Only the most salient points can be considered. Many
who would amply repay a careful study have simply been glanced at, and
others have been omitted altogether. As it would be out of the question
in a few pages to make an adequate portrait of women who occupy so
conspicuous a place in history as Mme. De Maintenon and Mme. De Stael,
the former has been reluctantly passed with a simple allusion, and
the latter outlined in a brief resume not at all proportional to the
relative interest or importance of the subject.

I do not claim to present a complete picture of French society, and
without wishing to give too rose-colored a view, it has not seemed to
me necessary to dwell upon its corrupt phases. If truth compels one
sometimes to state unpleasant facts in portraying historic characters,
it is as needless and unjust as in private life to repeat idle and
unproved tales, or to draw imaginary conclusions from questionable data.
The conflict of contemporary opinion on the simplest matters leads
one often to the suspicion that all personal history is more or less
disguised fiction. The best one can do in default of direct records
is to accept authorities that are generally regarded as the most
trustworthy.

This volume is affectionately dedicated to the memory of my mother, who
followed the work with appreciative interest in its early stages, but
did not live to see its conclusion.

Amelia Gere Mason Paris, July 6, 1891




TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. SALONS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Characteristics of French
Woman--Gallic Genius for Conversation--Social Conditions--Origin of the
Salons--Their Power--Their Composition--Their Records

CHAPTER II. THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET Mme. De Rambouillet--The
Salon Bleu--Its Habitues--Its
Diversions--Corneille--Balzac--Richelieu--Romance of the
Grand Conde--the Young Bossuet--Voiture--The Duchesse de
Longueville--Angelique Paulet--Julie d'Angennes--Les Precieuses
Ridicules--Decline of the Salon--Influence upon Literature and Manners

CHAPTER III. MADEMOISELLE DE SCUDERY AND THE SAMEDIS Salons of the
Noblesse--"The Illustrious Sappho"--Her Romances--The Samedis--Bons Mots
of Mme. Cornuel--Estimate of Mlle. De Scudery

CHAPTER IV. LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE Her Character--Her Heroic Part in the
Fronde--Her Exile--Literary Diversions of her Salon--A Romantic Episode

CHAPTER V. A LITERARY SALON AT PORT ROYAL Mme. De Sable--Her
Worldly Life--Her Retreat--Her Friends--Pascal--The Maxims of La
Rochefoucauld--Last Days of the Marquise

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. Duplessis Guengaud--Mme. De
Coulanges--The Curtain Falls

CHAPTER VII. MADAME DE LA FAYETTE Her Friendship with Mme. De
Sevigne--Her Education--Her Devotion to the Princess Henrietta--Her
Salon--La Rochefoucauld-- Talent as a Diplomatist--Comparison with Mme.
De Maintenon--Her Literary Work--Sadness of her Last Days--Woman in
Literature

CHAPTER VIII. SALONS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Characteristics of
the Eighteenth Century--Its Epicurean Philosophy--Anecdote of Mme. Du
Deffand--The Salon an Engine of Political Power--Great Influence of
Woman--Salons Defined--Literary Dinners--Etiquette of the Salons--An
Exotic on American Soil

CHAPTER IX. AN ANTECHAMBER OF THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE The Marquise de
Lambert--Her "Bureau d'Esprit"--Fontenelle--Advice to her Son--Wise
Thoughts on the Education of Women--Her Love of Consideration--Her
Generosity--Influence of Women upon the Academy

CHAPTER X. THE DUCHESSE DU MAINE Her Capricious Character--Her
Esprit--Mlle. De Launay--Clever Portrait of her Mistress--Perpetual
Fetes at Sceaux--Voltaire and the "Divine Emilie"--Dilettante Character
of this Salon

CHAPTER XI. MADAME DE TENCIN AND MADAM DU CHATELET An Intriguing
Chanoinesse--Her Singular Fascination--Her Salon--Its Philosophical
Character--Mlle. Aisse--Romances of Mme. De Tencin--D'Alembert--La Belle
Emilie--Voltaire--the Two Women Compared

CHAPTER XII. MADAME GEOFFRIN AND THE PHILOSOPHERS Cradles of the New
Philosophy--Noted Salons of this Period--Character of Mme. Geoffrin--Her
Practical Education--Anecdotes of her Husband--Composition of her
Salon--Its Insidious Influence--Her Journey to Warsaw--Her Death

CHAPTER XIII. ULTRA PHILOSOPHICAL SALONS--MADAME D'EPINAY Mme. De
Graffigny--Baron D'Holbach--Mme. D'Epinay's Portrait of Herself--Mlle.
Quinault--Rousseau--La Chevrette--Grimm--Diderot--The Abbe
Galiani--Estimate of Mme. D'Epinay

CHAPTER XIV. SALONS OF THE NOBLESSE--MADAME DU DEFFAND La Marechale
de Luxenbourg--The Temple--Comtesse de Boufflers--Mme. Du Dufand--Her
Convent Salon--Rupture with Mlle. De Lespinasse--Her Friendship with
Horace Walpole--Her Brilliancy and her Ennui

CHAPTER XV. MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE A Romantic Career--Companion
of Mme. Du Deffand--Rival Salons--Association with the
Encyclopedists--D'Alembert--A Heart Tragedy--Impassioned Letters--A Type
Unique in her Age

CHAPTER XVI. THE SALON HELVETIQUE The Swiss Pastor's Daughter--Her
Social Ambition--Her Friends Mme. De Marchais--Mme. D'Houdetot--Duchesse
de Lauzun--Character of Mme. Necker--Death at Coppet--Close of the Most
Brilliant Period of the Salons

CHAPTER XVII. SALONS OF THE REVOLUTION--MADAME ROLAND Change in the
Character of the Salons--Mme. De Condorcet--Mme. Roland's Story of
her Own Life--A Marriage of Reason--Enthusiasm for the Revolution--Her
Modest Salon--Her Tragical Fate

CHAPTER XVIII. MADAM DE STAEL Supremacy of Her Genius--Her Early
Training--Her Sensibility--A Mariage de Convenance--Her Salon--Anecdote
of Benjamin Constant--Her Exile--Life at Coppet--Secret Marriage--Close
of a Stormy Life

CHAPTER XIX. SALONS OF THE EMPIRE AND RESTORATION--MADAME RECAMIER A
Transition period--Mme. De Montesson--Mme. De Genus--Revival of the
Literary Spirit--Mme. De Beaumont--Mme. De Remusat--Mme. De Souza--Mme.
De Duras--Mme. De Krudener--Fascination of Mme. Recamier--Her
Friends--Her Convent Salon--Chateaubriand Decline of the Salon




CHAPTER I. SALONS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

_Characteristics of French Woman--Gallic Genius for Conversation--Social
Conditions--Origin of the Salons--Their Power--Their Composition--Their
Records._

"Inspire, but do not write," said LeBrun to women. Whatever we may think
today of this rather superfluous advice, we can readily pardon a man
living in the atmosphere of the old French salons, for falling somewhat
under the special charm of their leaders. It was a charm full of subtle
flattery. These women were usually clever and brilliant, but their
cleverness and brilliancy were exercised to bring into stronger relief
the talents of their friends. It is true that many of them wrote,
as they talked, out of the fullness of their own hearts or their own
intelligence, and with no thought of a public; but it was only an
incident in their lives, another form of diversion, which left them
quite free from the dreaded taint of feminine authorship. Their peculiar
gift was to inspire others, and much of the fascination that gave them
such power in their day still clings to their memories. Even at this
distance, they have a perpetual interest for us. It may be that the
long perspective lends them a certain illusion which a closer view might
partly dispel. Something also may be due to the dark background against
which they were outlined. But, in spite of time and change, they stand
out upon the pages of history, glowing with an ever-fresh vitality, and
personifying the genius of a civilization of which they were the fairest
flower.

The Gallic genius is eminently a social one, but it is, of all others,
the most difficult to reproduce. The subtle grace of manner, the magic
of spoken words, are gone with the moment. The conversations of two
centuries ago are today like champagne which has lost its sparkle.
We may recall their tangible forms--the facts, the accessories, the
thoughts, even the words, but the flavor is not there. It is the
volatile essence of gaiety and wit that especially characterizes French
society. It glitters from a thousand facets, it surprises us in a
thousand delicate turns of thought, it appears in countless movements
and shades of expression. But it refuses to be imprisoned. Hence the
impossibility of catching the essential spirit of the salons. We know
something of the men and women who frequented them, as they have left
many records of themselves. We have numerous pictures of their social
life from which we may partially reconstruct it and trace its influence.
But the nameless attraction that held for so long a period the most
serious men of letters as well as the gay world still eludes us.

We find the same elusive quality in the women who presided over these
reunions. They were true daughters of a race of which Mme. De Graffigny
wittily said that it "escaped from the hands of Nature when there had
entered into its composition only air and fire." They certainly were not
faultless; indeed, some of them were very faulty. Nor were they, as a
rule, remarkable for learning. Even the leaders of noted literary salons
often lacked the common essentials of a modern education. But if they
wrote badly and spelled badly, they had an abundance of that delicate
combination of intellect and wit which the French call ESPRIT. They had
also, in superlative measure, the social gifts which women of genius
reared in the library or apart from the world, are apt to lack. The
close study of books leads to a knowledge of man rather than of men. It
tends toward habits of introspection which are fatal to the clear and
swift vision required for successful leadership of any sort. Social
talent is distinct, and implies a happy poise of character and
intellect; the delicate blending of many gifts, not the supremacy of
one. It implies taste and versatility, with fine discrimination, and
the tact to sink one's personality as well as to call out the best
in others. It was this flexibility of mind, this active intelligence
tempered with sensibility and the native instinct of pleasing, that
distinguished the French women who have left such enduring traces upon
their time. "It is not sufficient to be wise, it is necessary also
to please," said the witty and penetrating Ninon, who thus very aptly
condensed the feminine philosophy of her race. Perhaps she has revealed
the secret of their fascination, the indefinable something which is as
difficult to analyze as the perfume of a rose.

A history of the French salons would include the history of the entire
period of which they were so prominent a factor. It would make known to
us its statesmen and its warriors; it would trace the great currents of
thought; it would give us glimpses of every phase of society, from the
diversions of the old noblesse, with their sprinkling of literature and
philosophy, to the familiar life of the men of letters, who cast about
their intimate coteries the halo of their own genius. These salons were
closely interwoven with the best intellectual life of more than two
hundred years. Differing in tone according to the rank, taste, or
character of their leaders, they were rallying points for the most
famous men and women of their time. In these brilliant centers, a new
literature had its birth. Here was found the fine critical sense that
put its stamp on a new poem or a new play. Here ministers were created
and deposed, authors and artists were brought into vogue, and vacant
chairs in the Academie Francaise were filled. Here the great philosophy
of the eighteenth century was cradled. Here sat the arbiters of manners,
the makers of social success. To these high tribunals came, at last,
every aspirant for fame.

It was to the refinement, critical taste, and oral force of a rare
woman, half French and half Italian, that the first literary salons owed
their origin and their distinctive character. In judging of the work of
Mme. De Rambouillet, we have to consider that in the early days of the
seventeenth century knowledge was not diffused as it is today. A new
light was just dawning upon the world, but learning was still locked
in the brains of savants, or in the dusty tomes of languages that were
practically obsolete. Men of letters were dependent upon the favors of
noble but often ignorant patrons, whom they never met on a footing of
equality. The position of women was as inferior as their education,
and the incredible depravity of morals was a sufficient answer to the
oft-repeated fallacy that the purity of the family is best maintained
by feminine seclusion. It is true there were exceptions to this reign
of illiteracy. With the natural disposition to glorify the past, the
writers of the next generation liked to refer to the golden era of the
Valois and the brilliancy of its voluptuous court. Very likely they
exaggerated a little the learning of Marguerite de Navarre, who was said
to understand Latin, Italian, Spanish, even Greek and Hebrew. But
she had rare gifts, wrote religious poems, besides the very secular
"Heptameron" which was not eminently creditable to her refinement, held
independent opinions, and surrounded herself with men of letters. This
little oasis of intellectual light, shadowed as it was with vices,
had its influence, and there were many women in the solitude of remote
chateaux who began to cultivate a love for literature. "The very
women and maidens aspired to this praise and celestial manna of good
learning," said Rabelais. But their reading was mainly limited to his
own unsavory satires, to Spanish pastorals, licentious poems, and their
books of devotion. It was on such a foundation that Mme. De Rambouillet
began to rear the social structure upon which her reputation rests.
She was eminently fitted for this role by her pure character and fine
intelligence; but she added to these the advantages of rank and
fortune, which gave her ample facilities for creating a social center
of sufficient attraction to focus the best intellectual life of the age,
and sufficient power to radiate its light. Still it was the tact and
discrimination to select from the wealth of material about her, and
quietly to reconcile old traditions with the freshness of new ideas,
that especially characterized Mme. De Rambouillet.

It was this richness of material, the remarkable variety and originality
of the women who clustered round and succeeded their graceful leader,
that gave so commanding an influence to the salons of the seventeenth
century. No social life has been so carefully studied, no women have
been so minutely portrayed. The annals of the time are full of them.
They painted one another, and they painted themselves, with realistic
fidelity. The lights and shadows are alike defined. We know their joys
and their sorrows, their passions and their follies, their tastes and
their antipathies. Their inmost life has been revealed. They animate,
as living figures, a whole class of literature which they were largely
instrumental in creating, and upon which they have left the stamp of
their own vivid personality. They appear later in the pages of Cousin
and Sainte-Beuve, with their radiant features softened and spiritualized
by the touch of time. We rise from a perusal of these chronicles of a
society long passed away, with the feeling that we have left a company
of old friends. We like to recall their pleasant talk of themselves, of
their companions, of the lighter happenings, as well as the more serious
side of the age which they have illuminated. We seem to see their faces,
not their manner, watch the play of intellect and feeling, while they
speak. The variety is infinite and full of charm.

Mme. de Sevigne talks upon paper, of the trifling affairs of every-day
life, adding here and there a sparkling anecdote, a bit of gossip, a
delicate characterization, a trenchant criticism, a dash of wit, a
touch of feeling, or a profound thought. All this is lighted up by
her passionate love of her daughter, and in this light we read the
many-sided life of her time for twenty-five years. Mme. de La Fayette
takes the world more seriously, and replaces the playful fancy of her
friend by a richer vein of imagination and sentiment. She sketches for
us the court of which Madame (title given to the wife of the king's
brother) is the central figure--the unfortunate Princes Henrietta whom
she loved so tenderly, and who died so tragically in her arms. She
writes novels too; not profound studies of life, but fine and exquisite
pictures of that side of the century which appealed most to her poetic
sensibility. We follow the leading characters of the age through the
ten-volume romances of Mlle. de Scudery, which have mostly long since
fallen into oblivion. Doubtless the portraits are a trifle rose-colored,
but they accord, in the main, with more veracious history. The Grande
Mademoiselle describes herself and her friends, with the curious naivete
of a spoiled child who thinks its smallest experiences of interest to
all the world. Mme. de Maintenon gives us another picture, more serious,
more thoughtful, but illuminated with flashes of wonderful insight.

Most of these women wrote simply to amuse themselves and their friends.
It was only another mode of their versatile expression. With rare
exceptions, they were not authors consciously or by intention. They
wrote spontaneously, and often with reckless disregard of grammar and
orthography. But the people who move across their gossiping pages are
alive. The century passes in review before us as we read. The men and
women who made its literature so brilliant and its salons so famous,
become vivid realities. Prominent among the fair faces that look out
upon us at every turn, from court and salon, is that of the Duchesse de
Longueville, sister of the Grand Conde, and heroine of the Fronde. Her
lovely blue eyes, with their dreamy languor and "luminous awakenings,"
turn the heads alike of men and women, of poet and critic, of statesman
and priest. We trace her brief career through her pure and ardent youth,
her loveless marriage, her fatal passion for La Rochefoucauld, the final
shattering of all her illusions; and when at last, tired of the world,
she bows her beautiful head in penitent prayer, we too love and forgive
her, as others have done. Were not twenty-five years of suffering and
penance an ample expiation? She was one of the three women of whom
Cardinal Mazarin said that they were "capable of governing and
overturning three kingdoms." The others were the intriguing Duchesse de
Chevreuse, who dazzled the age by her beauty and her daring escapades,
and the fascinating Anne de Gonzague, better known as the Princesse
Palatine, of whose winning manners, conversational charm, penetrating
intellect, and loyal character Bossuet spoke so eloquently at her death.
We catch pleasant glimpses of Mme. Deshoulieres, beautiful and a poet;
of Mme. Cornuel, of whom it was said that "every sin she confessed
was an epigram"; of Mme. de Choisy, witty and piquante; of Mme. de
Doulanges, also a wit and femme d'esprit.

Linked with these by a thousand ties of sympathy and affection were the
worthy counterparts of Pascal and Arnauld, of Bossuet and Fenelon, the
devoted women who poured out their passionate souls at the foot of the
cross, and laid their earthly hopes upon the altar of divine love. We
follow the devout Jacqueline Pascal to the cloister in which she buries
her brilliant youth to die at thirty-five of a wounded conscience and a
broken heart. Many a bruised spirit, as it turns from the gay world
to the mystic devotion which touches a new chord in its jaded
sensibilities, finds support and inspiration in the strong and fervid
sympathy of Jacqueline Arnauld, better known as Mere Angelique of Port
Royal. This profound spiritual passion was a part of the intense life of
the century, which gravitated from love and ambition to the extremes of
penitence and asceticism.

A multitude of minor figures, graceful and poetic, brilliant and
spirituelles, flit across the canvas, leaving the fragrance of an
exquisite individuality, and tempting one to extend the list of the
versatile women who toned and colored the society of the period. But we
have to do, at present, especially with those who gathered and blended
this fresh intelligence, delicate fancy, emotional wealth, and religious
fervor, into a society including such men as Corneille, Balzac, Bossuet,
Richelieu, Conde, Pascal, Arnault, and La Rochefoucauld--those who are
known as leaders of more or less celebrated salons. Of these, Mme. de
Rambouillet and Mme. de Sable were among the best representative types
of their time, and the first of the long line of social queens who,
through their special gift of leadership, held so potent a sway for two
centuries.




CHAPTER II. THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET

_Mme. de Rambouillet--The Salon Bleu--Its Habitues--Its
Diversions--Corneille--Balzac--Richelieu--Romance of the
Grand Conde--The Young Bossuet--Voiture--The Duchesse de
Longueville--Angelique Paulet--Julie d'Angennes--Les Precieuses
Ridicules--Decline of the Salon--Influence upon Literature and Manners_

The Hotel de Rambouillet has been called the "cradle of polished
society," but the personality of its hostess is less familiar than that
of many who followed in her train. This may be partly due to the fact
that she left no record of herself on paper. She aptly embodied the kind
advice of Le Brun. It was her special talent to inspire others and to
combine the various elements of a brilliant and complex social life.
The rare tact which enabled her to do this lay largely in a certain
self-effacement and the peculiar harmony of a nature which presented few
salient points. She is best represented by the salon of which she was
the architect and the animating spirit; but even this is better known
today through its faults than its virtues. It is a pleasant task to
clear off a little dust from its memorials, and to paint in fresh colors
one who played so important a role in the history of literature and
manners.

Catherine de Vivonne was born at Rome in 1588. Her father, the Marquis
de Pisani, was French ambassador, and she belonged through her mother to
the old Roman families of Strozzi and Savelli. Married at sixteen to the
Count d'Angennes, afterwards Marquis de Rambouillet, she was introduced
to the world at the gay court of Henry IV. But the coarse and depraved
manners which ruled there were altogether distasteful to her delicate
and fastidious nature. At twenty she retired from these brilliant scenes
of gilded vice, and began to gather round her the coterie of choice
spirits which later became so famous.

Filled with the poetic ideals and artistic tastes which had been
nourished in a thoughtful and elegant seclusion, it seems to have been
the aim of her life to give them outward expression. Her mind, which
inherited the subtle refinement of the land of her birth, had taken its
color from the best Italian and Spanish literature, but she was in no
sense a learned woman. She was once going to study Latin, in order to
read Virgil, but was prevented by ill health. It is clear, however, that
she had a great diversity of gifts, with a basis of rare good sense and
moral elevation. "She was revered, adored," writes Mme. de Motteville;
"a model of courtesy, wisdom, knowledge, and sweetness." She is always
spoken of in the chronicles of her time as a loyal wife, a devoted
mother, the benefactor of the suffering, and the sympathetic adviser
of authors and artists. The poet Segrais says: "She was amiable and
gracious, of a sound and just mind; it is she who has corrected the bad
customs which prevailed before her. She taught politeness to all those
of her time who frequented her house. She was also a good friend, and
kind to every one." We are told that she was beautiful, but we know only
that her face was fair and delicate, her figure tall and graceful, and
her manner stately and dignified. Her Greek love of beauty expressed
itself in all her appointments. The unique and original architecture of
her hotel,--which was modeled after her own designs,--the arrangement of
her salon, the pursuits she chose, and the amusements she planned, were
all a part of her own artistic nature. This was shown also in her code
of etiquette, which imposed a fine courtesy upon the members of her
coterie, and infused into life the spirit of politeness, which one of
her countrymen has called the "flower of humanity." But this esthetic
quality was tempered with a clear judgment, and a keen appreciation of
merit and talent, which led her to gather into her society many not "to
the manner born." Sometimes she delicately aided a needy man of letters
to present a respectable appearance--a kindness much less humiliating
in those days of patronage that it would be today. As may readily be
imagined, these new elements often jarred upon the tastes and prejudices
of her noble guests, but in spite of this it was considered an honor to
be received by her, and, though not even a duchess, she was visited by
princesses.

Adding to this spirit of noble independence the prestige of rank,
beauty, and fortune; a temper of mingled sweetness and strength;
versatile gifts controlled by an admirable reason; a serene and tranquil
character; a playful humor, free from the caprices of a too exacting
sensibility; a perfect savoir-faire, and we have the unusual combination
which enabled her to hold her sway for so many years, without a word of
censure from even the most scandal-loving of chroniclers.

"We have sought in vain," writes Cousin, "for that which is rarely
lacking in any life of equal or even less brilliancy, some calumny or
scandal, an equivocal word, or the lightest epigram. We have found only
a concert of warm eulogies which have run through many generations....
She has disarmed Tallemant himself. This caricaturist of the seventeenth
century has been pitiless towards the habitues of her illustrious house,
but he praises her with a warmth which is very impressive from such a
source."

The modern spirit of change has long since swept away all vestiges of
the old Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Lourvre and the time-honored dwellings that
ornamented it. Conspicuous among these, and not far from the Palais
Royal, was the famous Hotel de Rambouillet. The Salon Bleu has become
historic. This "sanctuary of the Temple of Athene," as it was called
in the stilted language of the day, has been illuminated for us by the
rank, beauty, and talent of the Augustan age of France. We are more or
less familiar with even the minute details of the spacious room, whose
long windows, looking across the little garden towards the Tuileries,
let in a flood of golden sunlight. We picture to ourselves its draperies
of blue and gold, its curious cabinets, its choice works of art, its
Venetian lamps, and its crystal vases always filled with flowers that
scatter the perfume of spring.

It was here that Mme. de Rambouillet held her court for nearly thirty
years, her salon reaching the height of its power under Richelieu, and
practically closing with the Fronde. She sought to gather all that was
most distinguished, whether for wit, beauty, talent, or birth, into an
atmosphere of refinement and simple elegance, which should tone down all
discordant elements and raise life to the level of a fine art. There
was a strongly intellectual flavor in the amusements, as well as in the
discussions of this salon, and the place of honor was given to genius,
learning, and good manners, rather than to rank. But it was by no means
purely literary. The exclusive spirit of the old aristocracy, with its
hauteur and its lofty patronage, found itself face to face with fresh
ideals. The position of the hostess enabled her to break the traditional
barriers, and form a society upon a new basis, but in spite of the
mingling of classes hitherto separated, the dominant life was that of
the noblesse. Woman of rank gave the tone and made the laws. Their code
of etiquette was severe. They aimed to combine the graces of Italy with
the chivalry of Spain. The model man must have a keen sense of honor,
and wit without pedantry; he must be brave, heroic, generous, gallant,
but he must also possess good breeding and gentle courtesy. The
coarse passions which had disgraced the court were refined into subtle
sentiments, and women were raised upon a pedestal, to be respectfully
and platonically adored. In this reaction from extreme license,
familiarity was forbidden, and language was subjected to a critical
censorship. It was here that the word PRECIEUSE was first used to
signify a woman of personal distinction, accomplished in the highest
sense, with a perfect accord of intelligence, good taste, and good
manners. Later, when pretension crept into the inferior circles which
took this one for a model, the term came to mean a sort of intellectual
parvenue, half prude and half pedant, who affected learning, and paraded
it like fine clothes, for effect.

"Do you remember," said Flechier, many years later, in his funeral
oration on the death of the Duchesse de Montausier, "the salons which
are still regarded with so much veneration, where the spirit was
purified, where virtue was revered under the name of the incomparable
Arthenice; where people of merit and quality assembled, who composed
a select court, numerous without confusion, modest without constraint,
learned without pride, polished without affectation?"

Whatever allowance we may be disposed to make for the friendship of the
eminent abbe, he spoke with the authority of personal knowledge, and at
a time when the memories of the Hotel de Rambouillet were still fresh.
It is true that those who belonged to this professed school of morals
were not all patterns of decorum. But we cannot judge by the Anglo-Saxon
standards of the nineteenth century the faults of an age in which a
Ninon de L'Enclos lives on terms of veiled intimacy with a strait-laced
Mme. de Maintenon, and, when age has given her a certain title to
respectability, receives in her salon women of as spotless reputation as
Mme. de La Fayette. Measured from the level of their time, the lives of
the Rambouillet coterie stand out white and shining. The pure character
of the Marquise and her daughters was above reproach, and they were
quoted as "models whom all the world cited, all the world admired, and
every one tried to imitate." To be a precieuse was in itself an evidence
of good conduct.

"This salon was a resort not only for all the fine wits, but for every
one who frequented the court," writes Mme. de Motteville. "It was a sort
of academy of beaux esprits, of gallantry, of virtue, and of science,"
says St. Simon; "for these things accorded marvelously. It was a
rendevous of all that was most distinguished in condition and in merit;
a tribunal with which it was necessary to count, and whose decisions
upon the conduct and reputation of people of the court and the world,
had great weight."

Corneille read most of his dramas here, and, if report be true, read
them very badly. He says of himself:

     Et l'on peut rarement m'ecouter sans ennui,
     Que quand je me produis par la bouche d'autrui.

He was shy, awkward, ill at ease, not clear in speech, and rather heavy
in conversation, but the chivalric and heroic character of his genius
was quite in accord with the lofty and rather romantic standards
affected by this circle, and made him one of its central literary
figures. Another was Balzac, whose fine critical taste did so much for
the elegance and purity of the French language, and who was as noted
in his day as was his namesake, the brilliant author of the "Comedie
Humaine," two centuries later. His long letters to the Marquise, on the
Romans, were read and discussed in his absence, and it was through
his influence, added to her own classic ideals, that Roman dignity and
urbanity were accepted as models in the new code of manners; indeed,
it was he who introduced the word URBANITE into the language. Armand
du Plessis, who aimed to be poet as well as statesman, read here in his
youth a thesis on love. When did a Frenchman ever fail to write with
facility upon this fertile theme? After he became Cardinal de Richelieu
he feared the influence of the Hotel de Rambouillet, and sent a request
to its hostess to report what was said of him there. She replied with
consummate tact, that her guests were so strongly persuaded of her
friendship for his Eminence, that no one would have the temerity to
speak ill of him in her presence.

Even the Grand Conde courted the muses, and wrote verses which were bad
for a poet, though fairly good for a warrior. If it be true that every
man is a poet once in his life, we may infer that this was about the
time of his sad little romance with the pretty and charming Mlle. du
Vigean, who was one of the youthful attractions of this coterie. Family
ambition stood in the way of their marriage, and the prince yielded to
the wishes of his friends. The Grande Mademoiselle tells us that this
was the only veritable passion of the brave young hero of many battles,
and that he fainted at the final separation. United to a wife he did not
love, and whom he did not scruple to treat very ill, he gave himself
to glory and, it must be added, to unworthy intrigues. The pure-hearted
young girl buried her beauty and her sorrows in the convent of the
Carmelites, and was no more heard of in the gay world.

It is evident that the great soldier sometimes forgot the urbanity
which was so strongly insisted upon in this society. He is said to have
carried the impetuosity of his character into his conversation. When he
had a good cause, he sustained it with grace and amiability. If it was a
bad one, however, his eyes flashed, and he became so violent that it was
thought prudent not to contradict him. It is related that Boileau, after
yielding one day in a dispute, remarked in a low voice to a friend:
"Hereafter I shall always be of the opinion of the Prince when he is
wrong."

Bossuet, when a boy of seventeen, improvised here one evening a sermon
on a given theme, which was so eloquent that it held the company until
near midnight. "I have never heard any one preach so early and so late,"
remarked the witty Voiture, as he congratulated the youthful orator at
the close.

This famous bel esprit played a very prominent part here. His role was
to amuse, and his talents gave him great vogue, but at this distance his
small vanities strike one much more vividly than the wit which flashed
out with the moment, or the vers de societe on which his fame rests.
He owed his social success to a rather high-flown love letter which
he evidently thought too good to be lost to the world. He sent it to a
friend, who had it printed and circulated. What the lady thought does
not appear, but it made the fortune of the poet. Though the son of a
wine merchant, and without rank, he had little more of the spirit of a
courtier than Voltaire, and his biting epigrams were no less feared.
"If he were one of us, he would be insupportable," said Conde. But his
caprices were tolerated for the sake of his inexhaustible wit, and he
was petted and spoiled to the end.

A list of the men of letters who appeared from time to time at the
Hotel de Rambouillet would include the most noted names of the century,
besides many which were famous in their day, but at present are little
more than historical shadows. The conversations were often learned,
doubtless sometimes pretentious. One is inclined to wonder if these
noble cavaliers and high-born woman did not yawn occasionally over the
scholarly discourse of Corneille and Balzac upon the Romans, the endless
disputes about rival sonnets, and the long discussions on the value of
a word. "Doubtless it is a very beautiful poem, but also very tiresome,"
said Mme. de Longueville, after Chapelain had finished reading his
"Pucelle"--a work which aimed to be the Iliad of France, but succeeded
only in being very long and rather heavy.

This lovely young Princess, who at sixteen had the exaltation of a
religieuse, and was with difficulty won from her dreams of renunciation
and a cloister, had become the wife of a man many years her senior,
whom she did not love, and the idol of the brilliant world in which she
lived. La Rochefoucauld had not yet disturbed the serenity of her heart,
nor political intrigues her peace of mind. It was before the Fronde, in
which she was destined to play so conspicuous a part, and she was still
content with the role of a reigning beauty; but she was not at all
averse to the literary entertainments of this salon, in which her own
fascinations were so delightfully sung. She found the flattering verses
of Voiture more to her taste than the stately epic of Chapelain, took
his side warmly against Benserade in the famous dispute as to the
merits of their two sonnets, "Job" and "Urania," and won him a doubtful
victory. The poems of Voiture lose much of their flavor in translation,
but I venture to give a verse in the original, which was addressed to
the charming princesse, and which could hardly fail to win the favor of
a young and beautiful woman.

     De perles, d'astres, et de fleurs,
     Bourbon, le ciel fit tes couleurs,
     Et mit dedans tout ce melange
     L'esprit d'une ange.

But the diversions were by no means always grave or literary. Life was
represented on many sides, one secret, doubtless, of the wide influence
of this society. The daughters of Mme. de Rambouillet, and her son, the
popular young Marquis de Pisani, formed a nucleus of youth and gaiety.
To these we may add the beautiful Angelique Paulet, who at seventeen
had turned the head of Henri IV, and escaped the fatal influence of that
imperious sovereign's infatuation by his timely, or untimely, death.
Fair and brilliant, the best singer of her time, skilled also in playing
the lute, and gifted with a special dramatic talent, she was always
a favorite, much loved by her friends and much sung by the poets. Her
proud and impetuous character, her frank and original manners, together
with her luxuriance of blonde hair, gained her the sobriquet of La Belle
Lionne. Nor must we forget Mlle. de Scudery, one of the most constant
literary lights of this salon, and in some sense its chronicler; nor the
fastidious Mme. de Sable.

The brightest ornament of the Hotel de Rambouillet, however, was Julie
d'Angennes, the petted daughter of the house, the devoted companion and
clever assistant of her mother. Her gaiety of heart, amiable temper,
ready wit, and gracious manners surrounded her with an atmosphere of
perpetual sunshine. Fertile in resources, of fine intelligence, winning
the love alike of men and women, she was the soul of the serious
conversations, as well as of the amusements which relieved them. These
amusements were varied and often original. They played little comedies.
They had mythological fetes, draping themselves as antique gods and
goddesses. Sometimes they indulged in practical jokes and surprises,
which were more laughable than dignified. Malherbe and Racan, the latter
sighing hopelessly over the attractions of the dignified Marquise, gave
her the romantic name of Arthenice, and forthwith the other members of
the coterie took some nom de parnasse, by which they were familiarly
known. They read the "Astree" of d'Urfe, that platonic dream of a
disillusioned lover; discussed the romances of Calprenede and the
sentimental Bergeries of Racan. Such Arcadian pictures seemed to have a
singular fascination for these courtly dames and plumed cavaliers. They
tried to reproduce them. Assuming the characters of the rather insipid
Strephons and florimels, they made love in pastoral fashion, with pipe
and lute--these rustic diversions serving especially to while away the
long summer days in the country at Rambouillet, at Chantilly, or at
Ruel. They improvised sonnets and madrigals; they praised each other in
verse; they wrote long letters on the slightest pretext. As a specimen
of the badinage so much in vogue, I quote from a letter written by
Voiture to one of the daughters of Mme. de Rambouillet, who was an
abbess, and had sent him a present of a cat.

"Madame, I was already so devoted to you that I supposed you knew there
was no need of winning me by presents, or trying to take me like a rat,
with a cat. Nevertheless, if there was anything in my thought that was
not wholly yours, the cat which you have sent me has captured it."
After a eulogy upon the cat, he adds: "I can only say that it is very
difficult to keep, and for a cat religiously brought up it is very
little inclined to seclusion. It never sees a window without wishing to
jump out, it would have leaped over the wall twenty times if it had
not been prevented, and no secular cat could be more lawless or more
self-willed."

The wit here is certainly rather attenuated, but the subject is an
ungrateful one. Mme. de Sevigne finds Voiture "libre, badin, charmant,"
and disposes of his critics by saying, "So much the worse for those
who do not understand him." One is often puzzled to detect this rare
spirituelle quality; but it is fair to presume that it was of the
volatile sort that evaporates with time.

All this sentimental masquerading and exaggerated gallantry suggests
the vulnerable side of the Hotel de Rambouillet, and the side which its
enemies have been disposed to make very prominent. Among those who tried
to imitate this salon, Spanish chivalry doubtless degenerated into a
thousand absurdities, and it must be admitted that the salon itself was
not free from reproach on this point. It became the fashion to write
and talk in the language of hyperbole. Sighing lovers were consumed with
artificial fires, and ready to die with affected languors. Like the
old poets of Provence, whose spirit they caught and whose phrases they
repeated, they were dying of love they did not feel. The eyes of Phyllis
extinguished the sun. The very nightingales expired of jealousy, after
hearing the voice of Angelique.

It would be difficult, perhaps, to find anywhere a company of clever
people bent upon amusing themselves and passing every day more or less
together, whose sayings and doings would bear to be exactly chronicled.
The literary diversions and poetic ideals of this circle, too, gave a
certain color to the charge of affectation, among people of less refined
instincts, who found its esprit incomprehensible, its manners prudish,
and its virtue a tacit reproach; but the dignified and serious character
of many of its constant habitues should be a sufficient guarantee that
it did not greatly pass the limits of good taste and good sense. The
only point upon which Mme. de Rambouillet seems to have been open to
criticism was a certain formal reserve and an over-fastidious delicacy;
but in an age when the standards of both refinement and morals were so
low, this implies a virtue rather than a defect. Nor does her character
appear to have been at all tinged with pretension. "I should fear from
your example to write in a style too elevated," says Voiture, in a
letter to her. But traditions are strong, and people do not readily
adapt themselves to new models. Character and manners are a growth.
That which is put on, and not ingrained, is apt to lack true balance
and proportion. Hence it is not strange that this new order of things
resulted in many crudities and exaggerations.

It is not worth while to criticize too severely the plumed knights who
took the heroes of Corneille as models, played the harmless lover,
and paid the tribute of chivalric deference to women. The strained
politeness may have been artificial, and the forms of chivalry very
likely outran the feeling, but they served at least to keep it alive,
while the false platonism and ultra-refined sentiment were simply moral
protests against the coarse vices of the time. The prudery which reached
a satirical climax in "Les Precieuses Ridicules" was a natural reaction
from the sensuality of a Marguerite and a Gabrielle. Mme. de Rambouillet
saw and enjoyed the first performance of this celebrated play, nor does
it appear that she was at all disturbed by the keen satire which was
generally supposed to have been directed toward her salon. Moliere
himself disclaims all intention of attacking the true precieuse; but the
world is not given to fine discrimination, and the true suffers from the
blow aimed at the false. This brilliant comedian, whose manners were
not of the choicest, was more at home in the lax and epicurean world of
Ninon and Mme. de la Sabliere--a world which naturally did not find the
decorum of the precieuses at all to its taste; the witticism of Ninon,
who defined them as the "Jansenists of love," is well known. It is not
unlikely that Moliere shared her dislike of the powerful and fastidious
coterie whose very virtues might easily have furnished salient points
for his scathing wit.

But whatever affectations may have grown out of the new code of manners,
it had a more lasting result in the fine and stately courtesy which
pervaded the later social life of the century. We owe, too, a profound
gratitude to these women who exacted and were able to command a
consideration which with many shades of variation has been left as a
permanent heritage to their sex. We may smile at some of their follies;
have we not our own which some nineteenth century Moliere may serve up
for the delight and possible misleading of future generations?

There is a warm human side to this daily intercourse, with its sweet and
gracious courtesies. The women who discuss grave questions and make or
unmake literary reputations in the salon, are capable of rare sacrifices
and friendships that seem quixotic in their devotion. Cousin, who
has studied them so carefully and so sympathetically, has saved from
oblivion many private letters which give us pleasant glimpses of their
everyday life. As we listen to their quiet exchange of confidences, we
catch the smile that plays over the light badinage, or the tear that
lurks in the tender words.

A little son of Mme. de Rambouillet has the small pox, and his sister
Julie shares the care of him with her mother, when every one else
has fled. At his death, she devotes herself to her friend Mme. de
Longueville, who soon after her marriage is attacked with the same
dreaded malady. Mme. de Sable is afraid of contagion, and refuses to
see Mlle. de Rambouillet, who writes her a characteristic letter. As it
gives us a vivid idea of her esprit as well as of her literary style, I
copy it in full, though it has been made already familiar to the English
reader by George Eliot, in her admirable review of Cousin's "Life of
Mme. De Sable."

Mlle de Chalais (Dame de compagnie to the Marquise) will please read
this letter to Mme. la Marquise, out of the wind.

Madame, I cannot begin my treaty with you too early, for I am sure
that between the first proposition made for me to see you, and
the conclusion, you will have so many reflections to make, so many
physicians to consult, and so many fears to overcome, that I shall have
full leisure to air myself. The conditions which I offer are, not to
visit you until I have been three days absent from the Hotel de Conde,
to change all my clothing, to choose a day when it has frozen, not to
approach you within four paces, not to sit down upon more than one seat.
You might also have a great fire in your room, burn juniper in the four
corners, surround yourself with imperial vinegar, rue, and wormwood.
If you can feel safe under these conditions, without my cutting off
my hair, I swear to you to execute them religiously; and if you need
examples to fortify you, I will tell you that the Queen saw M. de
Chaudebonne when he came from Mlle. de Bourbon's room, and that Mme.
d'Aiguillon, who has good taste and is beyond criticism on such points,
has just sent me word that if I did not go to see her, she should come
after me.

Mme. de Sable retorts in a satirical vein, that her friend is too well
instructed in the needed precautions, to be quite free from the charge
of timidity, adding the hope that since she understands the danger, she
will take better care of herself in the future.

This calls forth another letter, in which Mlle. de Rambouillet says,
"One never fears to see those whom one loves. I would have given
much, for your sake, if this had not occurred." She closes this spicy
correspondence, however, with a very affectionate letter which calms the
ruffled temper of her sensitive companion.

Mme. de Sable has another friend, Mlle. d'Attichy, who figures quite
prominently in the social life of a later period, as the Comtesse de
Maure. This lady was just leaving Paris to visit her in the country,
when she learned that Mme. de Sable had written to Mme. de Rambouillet
that she could conceive of no greater happiness than to pass her life
alone with Julie d'Angennes. This touches her sensibilities so keenly
that she changes her plans, and refuses to visit one who could find
her pleasure away from her. Mme. de Sable tries in vain to appease her
exacting friend, who replies to her explanations by a long letter in
which she recalls their tender and inviolable friendship, and closes
with these words:

     Malheurteuse est l'ignorance,
     Et plus malheureux le savoir.

Having thus lost a confidence which alone rendered life supportable to
me, I cannot dream of taking the journey so much talked of; for there
would be no propriety in traveling sixty leagues at this season, in
order to burden you with a person so uninteresting to you, that after
years of a passion without parallel you cannot help thinking that the
greatest pleasure would consist in passing life without her. I return
then into my solitude, to examine the faults which cause me so much
unhappiness, and unless I can correct them, I should have less joy than
confusion in seeing you. I kiss your hands very humbly.

How this affair was adjusted does not appear, but as they remained
devoted friends through life, unable to live apart, or pass a day
happily without seeing each other, it evidently did not end in a serious
alienation. It suggests, however, a delicacy and an exaltation of
feeling which we are apt to accord only to love, and which go far toward
disproving the verdict of Mongaigne, that "the soul of a woman is not
firm enough for so durable a tie as friendship."

We like to dwell upon these inner phases of a famous and powerful
coterie, not only because they bring before us so vividly the living,
moving, thinking, loving women who composed it, letting us into their
intimate life with its quiet shadings, its fantastic humors, and its
wayward caprices, but because they lead us to the fountain head of a
new form of literary expression. We have seen that the formal letters of
Balzac were among the early entertainments of the Hotel de Rambouillet,
and that Voiture had a witty or sentimental note for every occasion.
Mlle. de Scudery held a ready pen, and was in the habit of noting down
in her letters to absent friends the conversation, which ran over a
great variety of topics, from the gossip of the moment to the gravest
questions. There was no morning journal with its columns of daily news,
no magazine with its sketches of contemporary life, and these private
letters were passed from one to another to be read and discussed. The
craze for clever letters spread. Conversations literally overflowed upon
paper. A romantic adventure, a bit of scandal, a drawing room incident,
or a personal pique, was a fruitful theme. Everybody aimed to excel in
an art which brought a certain prestige. These letters, most of which
had their brief day, were often gathered into little volumes. Many have
long since disappeared, or found burial in the dust of old libraries
from which they are occasionally exhumed to throw fresh light upon some
forgotten nook and by way of an age whose habits and manners, virtues
and follies, they so faithfully record. A few, charged with the vitality
of genius, retain their freshness and live among the enduring monuments
of the society that gave them birth. The finest outcome of this
prevailing taste was Mme. de Sevigne, who still reigns as the queen
of graceful letter writers. Although her maturity belongs to a later
period, she was familiar with the Rambouillet circle in her youth, and
inherited its best spirit.

The charm of this literature is its spontaneity. It has no ulterior aim,
but delights in simple expression. These people write because they like
to write. They are original because they sketch from life. There is
something naive and fresh in their vivid pictures. They give us all the
accessories. They tell us how they lived, how they dressed, how they
thought, how they acted. They talk of their plans, their loves, and
their private piques, with the same ingenuous frankness. They condense
for us their worldly philosophy, their sentiments, and their experience.
The style of these letters is sometimes heavy and stilted, the wit is
often strained and far-fetched, but many of them are written with an
easy grace and a lightness of touch as fascinating as inimitable.

The marriage of Julie d'Angennes, in 1645, deprived the Hotel de
Rambouillet of one of its chief attractions. It was only through the
earnest wish of her family that, after a delay of thirteen years, she
yielded at last to the persevering suit of the Marquis, afterwards the
Duc de Montausier, and became his wife. She was then thirty-eight,
and he three years younger. The famous "Guirlande de Julie," which he
dedicated and presented to her, still exists, as the unique memorial
of his patient and enduring love. This beautiful volume, richly bound,
decorated with a flower exquisitely painted on each of the twenty-nine
leaves and accompanied by a madrigal written by the Marquis himself or
by some of the poets who frequented her house, was a remarkable tribute
to the graces of the woman whose praises were so delicately sung. The
faithful lover, who was a Protestant, gave a crowning proof of his
devotion, in changing his religion. So much adoration could hardly fail
to touch the most capricious and obdurate of hearts.

We cannot dismiss this woman, whom Cousin regards as the most
accomplished type of the society she adorned, without a word more.
Though her ambition was gratified by the honors that fell upon her
husband, who after holding many high positions was finally entrusted
with the education of the Dauphin; and though her own appointment of
dame d'honneur to the Queen gave her an envied place at court, we trace
with regret the close of her brilliant career. As has been already
indicated, she added to much esprit a character of great sweetness,
and manners facile, gracious, even caressing. With less elevation, less
independence, and less firmness than her mother, she had more of the
sympathetic quality, the frank unreserve, that wins the heart. No one
had so many adorers; no one scattered so many hopeless passions; no one
so gently tempered these into friendships. She knew always how to say
the fitting word, to charm away the clouds of ill humor, to conciliate
opposing interests. But this spirit of complaisance which, however
charming it may be, is never many degrees removed from the spirit of the
courtier, proved to be the misfortune of her later life. Too amiable,
perhaps too diplomatic, to frown openly upon the King's irregularities,
she was accused, whether justly or otherwise, of tacitly favoring his
relations with Mme. De Montespan. The husband of this lady took his
wife's infidelity very much to heart, and, failing to find any redress,
forced himself one day into the presence of Madam de Montausier, and
made a violent scene which so affected her that she fell into a profound
melancholy and an illness from which she never rallied. There is always
an air of mystery thrown about this affair, and it is difficult to
fathom the exact truth; but the results were sufficiently tragical to
the woman who was quoted by her age as a model of virtue and decorum.

In 1648, the troubles of the Fronde, which divided friends and added
fuel to petty social rivalries, scattered the most noted guests of the
Hotel de Rambouillet. Voiture was dead; Angelique Paulet died two years
later. The young Marquis de Pisani, the only son and the hope of his
family, had fallen with many brave comrades on the field of Nordlingen.
Of the five daughters, three were abbesses of convents. The health
of the Marquise, which had always been delicate, was still further
enfeebled by the successive griefs which darkened her closing years. Her
husband, of whom we know little save that he was sent on various foreign
missions, and "loved his wife always as a lover," died in 1652. She
survived him thirteen years, living to see the death of her youngest
daughter, Angelique, wife of the Comte de Grignan who was afterwards
the son-in-law of Mme. de Sevigne. She witnessed the elevation of her
favorite Julie, but was spared the grief of her death which occurred
five or six years after her own. The aged Marquise, true to her early
tastes, continued to receive her friends in her ruelle, and her salon
had a brief revival when the Duchesse de Montausier returned from the
provinces, after the second Fronde; but its freshness had faded with its
draperies of blue and gold. The brilliant company that made it so famous
was dispersed, and the glory of the Salon Bleu was gone.

There is something infinitely pathetic in the epitaph this much-loved
and successful woman wrote for herself when she felt that the end was
near:

     Ici git Arthenice, exempte des rigueurs
     Don't la rigueur du sort l'a touours poursuivie.
     Et si tu veux, passant, compter tous ses malheurs,
     Tu n'aura qu'a, compter les moments de sa vie.

The spirit of unrest is there beneath the calm exterior. It may be some
hidden wound; it may be only the old, old weariness, the inevitable
burden of the race. "Mon Dieu!" wrote Mme. de Maintenon, in the height
of her worldly success, "how sad life is! I pass my days without other
consolation than the thought that death will end it all."

Mme. de Rambouillet had worked unconsciously toward a very important
end. She found a language crude and inelegant, manners coarse and
licentious, morals dissolute and vicious. Her influence was at its
height in the age of Corneille and Descartes, and she lived almost to
the culmination of the era of Racine and Moliere, of Boileau and
La Bruyere, of Bossuet and Fenelon, the era of simple and purified
language, of refined and stately manners, and of at least outward
respect for morality. To these results she largely contributed. Her
salon was the social and literary power of the first half of the
century. In an age of political espionage, it maintained its position
and its dignity. It sustained Corneille against the persecutions of
Richelieu, and numbered among its habitues the founders of the Academie
Francaise, who continued the critical reforms begun there.

As a school of politeness, it has left permanent traces. This woman
of fine ideals and exalted standards exacted of others the purity
of character, delicacy of thought, and urbanity of manner, which she
possessed in so eminent a degree herself. Her code was founded upon the
best instincts of humanity, and whatever modifications of form time has
wrought its essential spirit remains unchanged. "Politeness does not
always inspire goodness, equity, complaisance, gratitude," says La
Bruyere, "but it gives at least the appearance of these qualities, and
makes man seem externally what he ought to be internally."

It was in this salon, too, that the modern art of conversation, which
has played so conspicuous a part in French life, may be said to have
had its birth. Men and women met on a footing of equality, with similar
tastes and similar interests. Different ranks and conditions were
represented, giving a certain cosmopolitan character to a society which
had hitherto been narrow in its scope and limited in its aims. Naturally
conversation assumed a new importance, and was subject to new laws. To
quote again from LaBruyere, who has so profoundly penetrated the secrets
of human nature: "The esprit of conversation consists much less in
displaying itself than in drawing out the wit of others... Men do not
like to admire you, they wish to please; they seek less to be instructed
or even to be entertained, than to be appreciated and applauded, and the
most delicate pleasure is to make that of others." "To please others,"
says La Rochefoucauld, "one must speak of the things they love and which
concern them, avoid disputes upon indifferent maters, ask questions
rarely, and never let them think that one is more in the right than
themselves."

Many among the great writers of the age touch in the same tone upon
the philosophy underlying the various rules of manners and conversation
which were first discussed at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and which have
passed into permanent though unwritten laws--unfortunately a little out
of fashion in the present generation.

It is difficult to estimate the impulse given to intelligence and
literary taste by this breaking up of old social crystallizations. What
the savant had learned in his closet passed more or less into current
coin. Conversation gave point to thought, clearness to expression,
simplicity to language. Women of rank and recognized ability imposed
the laws of good taste, and their vivid imaginations changed lifeless
abstractions into something concrete and artistic. Men of letters, who
had held an inferior and dependent position, were penetrated with the
spirit of a refined society, while men of the world, in a circle where
wit and literary skill were distinctions, began to aspire to the role
of a bel esprit, to pride themselves upon some intellectual gift and the
power to write without labor and without pedantry, as became their rank.
Many of them lacked seriousness, dealing mainly with delicate fancies
and trivial incidents, but pleasures of the intellect and taste became
the fashion. Burlesques and chansons disputed the palm with madrigals
and sonnets. A neatly turned epigram or a clever letter made a social
success.

Perhaps it was not a school for genius of the first order. Society
favors graces of form and expression rather than profound and serious
thought. No Homer, nor Aeschylus, nor Milton, nor Dante is the outgrowth
of such a soil. The prophet or seer shines by the light of his own soul.
He deals with problems and emotions that lie deep in the pulsing heart
of humanity, but he does not best interpret his generation. It is the
man living upon the level of his time, and finding his inspiration in
the world of events, who reflects its life, marks its currents, and
registers its changes. Matthew Arnold has aptly said that "the qualities
of genius are less transferable than the qualities of intelligence, less
can be immediately learned and appropriated from their product; they are
less direct and stringent intellectual agencies, though they may be
more beautiful and divine." It was this quality of intelligence that
eminently characterized the literature of the seventeenth century. It
was a mirror of social conditions, or their natural outcome. The spirit
of its social life penetrated its thought, colored its language, and
molded its forms. We trace it in the letters and vers de societe which
were the pastime of the Hotel de Rambouillet and the Samedis of Mlle. de
Scudery, as well as in the romances which reflected their sentiments and
pictured their manners. We trace it in the literary portraits which were
the diversion of the coterie of Mademoiselle, at the Luxembourg, and in
the voluminous memoirs and chronicles which grew out of it. We trace it
also in the "Maxims" and "Thoughts" which were polished and perfected in
the convent salon of Mme. de Sable, and were the direct fruits of a wide
experience and observation of the great world. It would be unfair to say
that anything so complex as the growth of a new literature was wholly
due to any single influence, but the intellectual drift of the time
seems to have found its impulse in the salons. They were the alembics in
which thought was fused and crystallized. They were the schools in which
the French mind cultivated its extraordinary clearness and flexibility.

As the century advanced, the higher literature was tinged and modified
by the same spirit. Society, with its follies and affectations, inspired
the mocking laughter of Moliere, but its unwritten laws tempered his
language and refined his wit. Its fine urbanity was reflected in the
harmony and delicacy of Racine, as well as in the critical decorum of
Boileau. The artistic sentiment rules in letters, as in social life. It
was not only the thought that counted, but the setting of the thought.
The majestic periods of Bossuet, the tender persuasiveness of Fenelon,
gave even truth a double force. The moment came when this critical
refinement, this devotion to form, passed its limits, and the inevitable
reaction followed. The great literary wave of the seventeenth century
reached its brilliant climax and broke upon the shores of a new era.
But the seeds of thought had been scattered, to spring up in the great
literature of humanity that marked the eighteenth century.




CHAPTER III. MADEMOISELLE DE SCUDERY AND THE SAMEDIS

_Salons of the Noblesse--"The Illustrious Sappho"--Her Romances--The
Samedis--Bon Mots of Mme. Cornuel--Estimate of Mlle. de Scudery_

There were a few contemporary salons among the noblesse, modeled more or
less after the Hotel de Rambouillet, but none of their leaders had the
happy art of conciliating so many elements. They had a literary flavor,
and patronized men of letters, often doubtless, because it was the
fashion and the name of a well-known litterateur gave them a certain
eclat; but they were not cosmopolitan, and have left no marked traces.
One of the most important of these was the Hotel de Conde, over which
the beautiful Charlotte de Montmorency presided with such dignity and
grace, during the youth of her daughter, the Duchesse de Longueville.
Another was the Hotel de Nevers, where the gifted Marie de Gonzague,
afterward Queen of Poland, and her charming sister, the Princesse
Palatine, were the central attractions of a brilliant and intellectual
society. Richelieu, recognizing the power of the Rambouillet circle,
wished to transfer it to the salon of his niece at the Petit Luxembourg.
We have a glimpse of the young and still worldly Pascal, explaining
here his discoveries in mathematics and his experiments in physics. The
tastes of this courtly company were evidently rather serious, as we
find another celebrity, of less enduring fame, discoursing upon the
immortality of the soul. But the rank, talent, and masterful character
of the Duchesse d'Aiguillon did not suffice to give her salon the
wide influence of its model; it was tainted by her own questionable
character, and always hampered by the suspicion of political intrigues.

There were smaller coteries, however, which inherited the spirit and
continued the traditions of the Hotel de Rambouillet. Prominent among
these was that of Madeleine de Scudery, who held her Samedis in modest
fashion in the Marais. These famous reunions lacked the prestige and the
fine tone of their model, but they had a definite position, and a wide
though not altogether favorable influence. As the forerunner of Mme.
de La Fayette and Mme. de Sevigne, and one of the most eminent literary
women of the century with which her life ran parallel, Mlle. de Scudery
has a distinct interest for us and it is to her keen observation and
facile pen that we are indebted for the most complete and vivid picture
of the social life of the period.

The "illustrious Sappho," as she was pleased to be called, certainly did
not possess the beauty popularly accorded to her namesake and prototype.
She was tall and thin, with a long, dark, and not at all regular face;
Mme. Cornuel said that one could see clearly "she was destined by
Providence to blacken paper, as she sweat ink from every pore." But,
if we may credit her admirers, who were numerous, she had fine eyes,
a pleasing expression, and an agreeable address. She evidently did
not overestimate her personal attractions, as will be seen from the
following quatrain, which she wrote upon a portrait made by one of her
friends.

     Nanteuil, en faisant mon image,
     A de son art divin signale le pouvoir;
     Je hais mes yeux dans mon miroir,
     Je les aime dans son ouvrage.

She had her share, however, of small but harmless vanities, and spoke
of her impoverished family, says Tallemant, "as one might speak of the
overthrow of the Greek empire." Her father belonged to an old and noble
house of Provence, but removed to Normandy, where he married and died,
leaving two children with a heritage of talent and poverty. A trace of
the Provencal spirit always clung to Madeleine, who was born in 1607,
and lived until the first year of the following century. After losing
her mother, who is said to have been a woman of some distinction, she
was carefully educated by an uncle in all the accomplishments of
the age, as well as in the serious studies which were then unusual.
According to her friend Conrart she was a veritable encyclopedia
of knowledge both useful and ornamental. "She had a prodigious
imagination," he writes, "an excellent memory, an exquisite judgment,
a lively temper, and a natural disposition to understand everything
curious which she saw done, and everything laudable which she heard
talked of. She learned the things that concern agriculture, gardening,
housekeeping, cooking, and a life in the country; also the causes and
effects of maladies, the composition of an infinite number of remedies,
perfumes, scented waters and distillations useful or agreeable. She
wished to play the lute, and took some lessons with success." In
addition to all this, she mastered Spanish and Italian, read extensively
and conversed brilliantly. At the death of her uncle and in the
freshness of her youth, she went to Paris with her brother who had some
pretension as a poet and dramatic writer. He even posed as a rival
of Corneille, and was sustained by Richelieu, but time has long since
relegated him to comparative oblivion. His sister, who was a victim of
his selfish tyranny, is credited with much of the prose which appeared
under his name; indeed, her first romances were thus disguised. Her love
for conversation was so absorbing, that he is said to have locked her
in her room, and refused her to her friends until a certain amount of
writing was done. But, in spite of this surveillance, her life was so
largely in the world that it was a mystery when she did her voluminous
work.

Of winning temper and pleasing address, with this full equipment of
knowledge and imagination, versatility and ambition, she was at an early
period domesticated in the family of Mme. de Rambouillet as the friend
and companion of Julie d'Angennes. Her graces of mind and her amiability
made her a favorite with those who frequented the house, and she was
thus brought into close contact with the best society of her time. She
has painted it carefully and minutely in the "Grand Cyrus," a romantic
allegory in which she transfers the French aristocracy and French
manners of the seventeenth century to an oriental court. The Hotel
de Rambouillet plays an important part as the Hotel Cleomire. When
we consider that the central figures were the Prince de Conde and
his lovely sister the Duchesse de Longueville, also that the most
distinguished men and women of the age saw their own portraits, somewhat
idealized but quite recognizable through the thin disguise of Persians,
Greeks, Armenians, or Egyptians, it is easy to imagine that the ten
volumes of rather exalted sentiment were eagerly sought and read. She
lacked incident and constructive power, but excelled in vivid portraits,
subtle analysis, and fine conversations. She made no attempt at local
color; her plots were strained and unnatural, her style heavy and
involved. But her penetrating intellect was thoroughly tinged with the
romantic spirit, and she had the art of throwing a certain glamour over
everything she touched. Cousin, who has rescued the memory of Mlle. de
Scudery from many unjust aspersions, says that she was the "creator
of the psychological romance." Unquestionably her skill in character
painting set the fashion for the pen portraits which became a mania a
few years later.

She depicts herself as Sapppho, whose opinions may be supposed to
reflect her own. In these days, when the position of women is discussed
from every possible point of view, it may be interesting to know how it
was regarded by one who represented the thoughtful side of the age in
which their social power was first distinctly asserted. She classes her
critics and enemies under several heads. Among them are the "light and
coquettish women whose only occupation is to adorn their persons
and pass their lives in fetes and amusements--women who think that
scrupulous virtue requires them to know nothing but to be the wife of a
husband, the mother of children, and the mistress of a family; and men
who regard women as upper servants, and forbid their daughters to read
anything but their prayer books."

"One does not wish women to be coquettes," she writes again, "but
permits them to learn carefully all that fits them for gallantry,
without teaching them anything which can fortify their virtue or occupy
their minds. They devote ten or a dozen years to learning to appear
well, to dress in good style, to dance and sing, for five or six; but
this same person, who requires judgment all her life and must talk
until her last sigh, learns nothing which can make her converse more
agreeably, or act with more wisdom."

But she does not like a femme savante, and ridicules, under the name
of Damophile, a character which might have been the model for Moliere's
Philaminte. This woman has five or six masters, of whom the least
learned teaches astrology. She poses as a Muse, and is always surrounded
with books, pencils, and mathematical instruments, while she uses large
words in a grave and imperious tone, although she speaks only of little
things. After many long conversations about her, Sappho concludes thus:
"I wish it to be said of a woman that she knows a hundred things of
which she does not boast, that she has a well-informed mind, is familiar
with fine works, speaks well, writes correctly, and knows the world; but
I do not wish it to be said of her that she is a femme savante. The two
characters have no resemblance." She evidently recognized the fact that
when knowledge has penetrated the soul, it does not need to be worn on
the outside, as it shines through the entire personality.

After some further discussion, to the effect that the wise woman will
conceal superfluous learning and especially avoid pedantry, she defines
the limit to which a woman may safely go in knowledge without losing her
right to be regarded as the "ornament of the world, made to be served
and adored."

One may know some foreign languages and confess to reading Homer,
Hesiod, and the works of the illustrious Aristee (Chapelain), without
being too learned. One may express an opinion so modestly that, without
offending the propriety of her sex, she may permit it to be seen that
she has wit, knowledge, and judgment. That which I wish principally to
teach women is not to speak too much of that which they know well, never
to speak of that which they do not know at all, and to speak reasonably.

We note always a half-apologetic tone, a spirit of compromise between
her conscious intelligence and the traditional prejudice which had in
no wise diminished since Martial included, in his picture of a domestic
menage, "a wife not too learned..." She is not willing to lose a woman's
birthright of love and devotion, but is not quite sure how far it might
be affected by her ability to detect a solecism. Hence, she offers
a great deal of subtle flattery to masculine self-love. With curious
naivete she says:

Whoever should write all that was said by fifteen or twenty women
together would make the worst book in the world, even if some of them
were women of intelligence. But if a man should enter, a single one,
and not even a man of distinction, the same conversation would suddenly
become more spirituelle and more agreeable. The conversation of men
is doubtless less sprightly when there are no women present; but
ordinarily, although it may be more serious, it is still rational, and
they can do without us more easily than we can do without them.

She attaches great importance to conversation as "the bond of society,
the greatest pleasure of well-bred people, and the best means of
introducing, not only politeness into the world, but a purer morality."
She dwells always upon the necessity of "a spirit of urbanity, which
banishes all bitter railleries, as well as everything that can offend
the taste," also of a certain "esprit de joie."

We find here the code which ruled the Hotel de Rambouillet, and the very
well-defined character of the precieuse. But it may be noted that Mlle.
de Scudery, who was among the avant-coureurs of the modern movement
for the advancement of women, always preserved the forms of the old
traditions, while violating their spirit. True to her Gallic instincts,
she presented her innovations sugar-coated. She had the fine sense of
fitness which is the conscience of her race, and which gave so
much power to the women who really revolutionized society without
antagonizing it.

Her conversations, which were full of wise suggestions and showed a
remarkable insight into human character, were afterwards published in
detached form and had a great success. Mme. de Sevigne writes to her
daughter: "Mlle. De Scudery has just sent me two little volumes of
conversations; it is impossible that they should not be good, when they
are not drowned in a great romance."

When the Hotel de Rambouillet was closed, Mlle. de Scudery tried to
replace its pleasant reunions by receiving her friends on Saturdays.
These informal receptions were frequented by a few men and women of
rank, but the prevailing tone was literary and slightly bourgeois. We
find there, from time to time, Mme. de Sable, the Duc and Duchesse de
Montausier, and others of the old circle who were her lifelong friends.
La Rochefoucauld is there occasionally, also Mme. de. La Fayette, Mme.
de Sevigne, and the young Mme. Scarron whose brilliant future is hardly
yet in her dreams. Among those less known today, but of note in their
age, were the Comtesse de la Suze, a favorite writer of elegies, who
changed her faith and became a Catholic, as she said, that she "might
not meet her husband in this world or the next;" the versatile Mlle.
Cheron who had some celebrity as a poet, musician, and painter; Mlle.
de la Vigne and Mme. Deshoulieres, also poets; Mlle. Descartes, niece
of the great philosopher; and, at rare intervals, the clever Abbess de
Rohan who tempered her piety with a little sage worldliness. One of the
most brilliant lights in this galaxy of talent was Mme. Cornuel, whose
bons mots sparkle from so many pages in the chronicles of the period.
A woman of high bourgeois birth and of the best associations, she had a
swift vision, a penetrating sense, and a clear intellect prompt to seize
the heart of a situation. Mlle. De Scudery said that she could paint
a grand satire in four words. Mme. de Sevigne found her admirable, and
even the grave Pomponne begged his friend not to forget to send him all
her witticisms. Of the agreeable but rather light Comtesse de Fiesque,
she said: "What preserves her beauty is that it is salted in folly."
Of James II of England, she remarked, "The Holy Spirit has eaten up
his understanding." The saying that the eight generals appointed at the
death of Turenne were "the small change for Turenne" has been attributed
to her. It is certainly not to a woman of such keen insight and ready
wit that one can attach any of the affectations which later crept into
the Samedis.

The poet Sarasin is the Voiture of this salon. Conrart, to whose house
may be traced the first meetings of the little circle of lettered men
which formed the nucleus of the Academie Francaise, is its secretary;
Pellisson, another of the founders and the historian of the same learned
body, is its chronicler. Chapelain is quite at home here, and we
find also numerous minor authors and artists whose names have small
significance today. The Samedis follow closely in the footsteps of the
Hotel de Rambouillet. It is the aim there to speak simply and naturally
upon all subjects grave or gay, to preserve always the spirit of
delicacy and urbanity, and to avoid vulgar intrigues. There is a
superabundance of sentiment, some affectation, and plenty of esprit.

They converse upon all the topics of the day, from fashion to politics,
from literature and the arts to the last item of gossip. They read their
works, talk about them, criticize them, and vie with one another in
improvising verses. Pellisson takes notes and leaves us a multitude of
madrigals, sonnets, chansons and letters of varied merit. He says there
reigned a sort of epidemic of little poems. "The secret influence began
to fall with the dew. Here one recites four verses; there, one writes
a dozen. All this is done gaily and without effort. No one bites his
nails, or stops laughing and talking. There are challenges, responses,
repetitions, attacks, repartees. The pen passes from hand to hand, and
the hand does not keep pace with the mind. One makes verses for every
lady present." Many of these verses were certainly not of the best
quality, but it would be difficult, in any age, to find a company of
people clever enough to divert themselves by throwing off such poetic
trifles on the spur of the moment.

In the end, the Samedis came to have something of the character of a
modern literary club, and were held at different houses. The company was
less choice, and the bourgeois coloring more pronounced. These reunions
very clearly illustrated the fact that no society can sustain itself
above the average of its members. They increased in size, but decreased
in quality, with the inevitable result of affectation and pretension.
Intelligence, taste, and politeness were in fashion. Those who did not
possess them put on their semblance, and, affecting an intellectual
tone, fell into the pedantry which is sure to grow out of the effort to
speak above one's altitude. The fine-spun theories of Mlle. de Scudery
also reached a sentimental climax in "Clelie," which did not fail of its
effect. Platonic love and the ton galant were the texts for innumerable
follies which finally reacted upon the Samedis. After a few years,
they lost their influence and were discontinued. But Mlle. de Scudery
retained the position which her brilliant gifts and literary fame had
given her, and was the center of a choice circle of friends until
a short time before her death at the ripe age of ninety-four. Even
Tallemant, writing of the decline of these reunions, says, "Mlle. De
Scudery is more considered than ever." At sixty-four she received the
first Prix D'Eloquence from the Academie Francaise, for an essay on
Glory. This prize was founded by Balzac, and the subject was specified.
Thus the long procession of laureates was led by a woman.

In spite of her subtle analysis of love, and her exact map of the Empire
of Tenderness, the sentiment of the "Illustrious Sappho" seems to
have been rather ideal. She had numerous adorers, of whom Conrart and
Pellisson were among the most devoted. During the long imprisonment
of the latter for supposed complicity with Fouquet, she was of great
service to him, and the tender friendship ended only with his life, upon
which she wrote a touching eulogy at its close. But she never married.
She feared to lose her liberty. "I know," she writes, "that there are
many estimable men who merit all my esteem and who can retain a part of
my friendship, but as soon as I regard them as husbands, I regard them
as masters, and so apt to become tyrants that I must hate them from
that moment; and I thank the gods for giving me an inclination very much
averse to marriage."

It was the misfortune of Mlle. de Scudery to outlive her literary
reputation. The interminable romances which had charmed the eloquent
Flechier, the Grand Conde in his cell at Vincennes, the ascetic
d'Andilly at Port Royal, as well as the dreaming maidens who signed over
their fanciful descriptions and impossible adventures, passed their day.
The touch of a merciless criticism stripped them of their already fading
glory. Their subtle analysis and etherealized sentiment were declared
antiquated, and fashion ran after new literary idols. It was Boileau who
gave the severest blow. "This Despreaux," said Segrais, "knows how to do
nothing else but talk of himself and criticize others; why speak ill of
Mlle. de Scudery as he has done?"

There has been a disposition to credit the founder of the Samedis with
many of the affectations which brought such deserved ridicule upon
their bourgeois imitators, and to trace in her the original of Moliere's
"Madelon." But Cousin has relieved her of such reproach, and does ample
justice to the truth and sincerity of her character, the purity of her
manners, and the fine quality of her intellect. He calls her "a sort
of French sister of Addison." Perhaps her resemblance to one of the
clearest, purest, and simplest of English essayists is not quite
apparent on the surface; but as a moralist and a delineator of manners
she may have done a similar work in her own way.

Sainte-Beuve, who has left so many vivid and exquisite portraits of
his countrywomen, does not paint Mlle. de Scudery with his usual kindly
touch. He admits her merit, her accomplishments, her versatility, and
the perfect innocence of her life; but he finds her didactic, pedantic,
and tiresome as a writer, and without charm or grace as a woman.
Doubtless one would find it difficult to read her romances today. She
lacks the genius which has no age and belongs to all ages. Her literary
life pertains to the first half of the seventeenth century, when style
had not reached the Attic purity and elegance of a later period. She was
teacher rather than artist; but no one could be farther from a bas bleu,
or more severe upon pedantry or pretension of any sort. She takes the
point of view of her time, and dwells always upon the wisdom of veiling
the knowledge she claims for her sex behind the purely feminine graces.
How far she practiced her own theories, we can know only from the
testimony of her contemporaries. It is not possible to perpetuate so
indefinable a thing as personal charm, but we are told repeatedly that
she had it in an eminent degree. It is certain that no woman without
beauty, fortune, or visible rank, living simply and depending mainly
upon her own talents, could have retained such powerful and fastidious
friends, during a long life, unless she had had some rare attractions.
That she was much loved, much praised, and much sought, we have
sufficient evidence among the writers of her own time. She was
familiarly spoken of as the tenth Muse, and she counted among her
personal friends the greatest men and women of the century. Leibnitz
sought her correspondence. The Abbe de Pure, who was not friendly to the
precieuses and made the first severe attack upon them, thus writes of
her: "One may call Mlle. de Scudery the muse of our age and the prodigy
of her sex. It is not only her goodness and her sweetness, but her
intellect shines with so much modesty, her sentiments are expressed with
so much reserve, she speaks with so much discretion, and all that she
says is so fit and reasonable, that one cannot help both admiring and
loving her. Comparing what one sees of her, and what one owes to her
personally, with what she writes, one prefers, without hesitation, her
conversation to her works. Although she has a wonderful mind, her heart
outweighs it. It is in the heart of this illustrious woman that one
finds true and pure generosity, an immovable constancy, a sincere and
solid friendship."

The loyalty of her character was conspicuously shown in her brave
devotion to the interests of the Conde family, through all the reverses
of the Fronde. In one of her darkest moments Mme. de Longueville
received the last volume of the "Grand Cyrus," which was dedicated to
her, and immediately sent her own portrait encircled with diamonds, as
the only thing she had left worthy of this friend who, without sharing
ardently her political prejudices, had never deserted her waning
fortunes. The same rare quality was seen in her unwavering friendship
for Fouquet, during his long disgrace and imprisonment. Mme. de Sevigne,
whose satire was so pitiless toward affectation of any sort, writes to
her in terms of exaggerated tenderness.

"In a hundred thousand words, I could tell you but one truth, which
reduces itself to assuring you, Mademoiselle, that I shall love you and
adore you all my life; it is only this word that can express the idea
I have of your extraordinary merit. I am happy to have some part in the
friendship and esteem of such a person. As constancy is a perfection,
I say to myself that you will not change for me; and I dare to pride
myself that I shall never be sufficiently abandoned of God not to be
always yours... I take to my son your conversations. I wish him to be
charmed with them, after being charmed myself."

Mlle. de Scudery is especially interesting to us as marking a transition
point in the history of women; as the author of the first romances of
any note written by her sex; as a moral teacher in an age of laxity;
and as a woman who combined high aspirations, fine ideals, and versatile
talents with a pure and unselfish character. She aimed at universal
accomplishments from the distillation of a perfume to the writing of a
novel, from the preparation of a rare dish to fine conversation,
from playing the lute to the dissection of the human heart. In this
versatility she has been likened to Mme. de Genlis, whom she resembled
also in her moral teaching and her factitious sensibility. She was,
however, more genuine, more amiable, and far superior in true elevation
of character. She was full of theories and loved to air them, hence the
people who move across the pages of her novels are often lost in a cloud
of speculation. But she gave a fresh impulse to literature, adding a
fine quality of grace, tenderness, and pure though often exaggerated
sentiment. Mme. de La Fayette, who had more clearness of mind as well as
a finer artistic sense, gave a better form to the novel and pruned it
of superfluous matter. The sentiment which casts so soft and delicate
a coloring over her romances was more subtle and refined. It may be
questioned, however, if she wrote so much that has been incorporated in
the thought of her time.




CHAPTER IV. LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE

_Her Character--Her Heroic Part in the Fronde--Her Exile--Literary
Diversions of her Salon--A Romantic Episode_

There are certain women preeminently distinguished by diversity of
gifts, who fail to leave behind them a fame at all commensurate with
their promise. It may be from a lack of unity, resulting from a series
of fragmentary efforts, no one of which is of surpassing excellence;
it may be that the impression of power they give is quite beyond any
practical manifestation of it; or it may be that talents in themselves
remarkable are cast into the shade by some exceptional brilliancy of
position. The success of life is measured by the harmony between its
ideals and its attainments. It is the symmetry of the temple that gives
the final word, not the breadth of its foundations nor the wealth of its
material.

It was this lack of harmony and fine proportion which marred the
career of a woman who played a very conspicuous part in the social and
political life of her time, and who belongs to my subject only through
a single phase of a stormy and eventful history. No study of the salons
would be complete without that of the Grande Mademoiselle, but it
was not as the leader of a coterie that she held her special claim to
recognition. By the accident of birth she stood apart, subject to many
limitations that modified the character of her salon and narrowed its
scope, though they emphasized its influence. It was only an incident
of her life, but through the quality of its habitues and their unique
diversions it became the source of an important literature.

Anne Marie Louise d'Orleans, Duchesse de Montpensier, has left a very
distinct record of herself in letters, romances, memoirs and portraits,
written out of an abounding fullness of nature, but with infinite detail
and royal contempt for precision and orthography. She talks naively
of her happy childhood, of her small caprices, of the love of her
grandmother, Marie de Medicis, of her innocent impressions of the people
about her. She dwells with special pleasure upon a grand fete at the
Palais Royal, in which she posed as an incipient queen. She was then
nineteen. "They were three entire days in arranging my costume," she
writes. "My robe was covered with diamonds, and trimmed with rose,
black, and white tufts. I wore all the jewels of the crown and of the
Queen of England, who still had some left. No one could be better or
more magnificently attired than I was that day, and many people said
that my beautiful figure, my imposing mien, my fair complexion, and the
splendor of my blonde hair did not adorn me less than all the riches
which were upon my person." She sat resplendent upon a raised dais, with
the proud consciousness of her right and power to grace a throne. Louis
XIV, than a child, and the Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles II, were
at her feet. The latter was a devoted suitor. "My heart as well as my
eyes regarded the prince de haut en bas," she says. "I had the spirit to
wed an emperor."

There were negotiations for her marriage with the Emperor of Austria,
and she thought it wise to adapt herself in advance to his tastes. She
had heard that he was religious, and immediately began to play the part
of a devote so seriously, that she was seized with a violent desire to
become a veritable religieuse and enter the convent of the Carmelites.
She could neither eat nor sleep, and it was feared that she would fall
dangerously ill. "I can only say that, during those eight days, the
empire was nothing to me," she writes. But she confesses to a certain
feeling of vanity at her own spirit of self-sacrifice, and the
sensibility which made her weep at the thought of leaving those she
loved. This access of piety was of short duration, however, as her
father quickly put to flight all her exalted visions of a cloister. Her
dreams of an emperor for whom she lost a prospective king were alike
futile.

"She had beauty, talent, wealth, virtue, and a royal birth," says Mme.
de Motteville. "Her face was not without defects, and her intellect was
not one which always pleases. Her vivacity deprived all her actions of
the gravity necessary to people of her rank, and her mind was too much
carried away by her feelings. As she was fair, had fine eyes, a pleasing
mouth, was of good height, and blonde, she had quite the air of a great
beauty." But it was beauty of a commanding sort, without delicacy, and
dependent largely upon the freshness of youth. The same veracious
writer says that "she spoiled all she went about by the eagerness and
impatience of her temper. She was always too hasty and pushed things too
far." What she may have lacked in grace and charm, she made up by the
splendors of rank and position.

A princess by birth, closely related to three kings, and glowing with
all the fiery instincts of her race, the Grand Mademoiselle curiously
blended the courage of an Amazon with the weakness of a passionate and
capricious woman. As she was born in 1627, the most brilliant days of
her youth were passed amid the excitements of the Fronde. She casts a
romantic light upon these trivial wars, which were ended at last by her
prompt decision and masculine force. We see her at twenty-five, riding
victoriously into the city of Orleans at the head of her troops and,
later, ordering the cannon at the Bastile turned against the royal
forces, and opening the gates of Paris to the exhausted army of Conde.
This adventure gives us the key-note to her haughty and imperious
character. She would have posed well for the heroine of a great drama;
indeed, she posed all her life in real dramas.

At this time she had hopes of marrying the Prince de Conde, whom she
regarded as a hero worthy of her. His wife, an amiable woman who was
sent to a convent after her marriage to learn to read and write, was
dangerously ill, and her illustrious husband did not scruple to make
tacit arrangements to supply her place. Unfortunately for these plans,
and fortunately perhaps for a certain interesting phase of literature,
she recovered. Soon afterwards, Mademoiselle found the reward of her
heroic adventures in a sudden exile to her estates at Saint Fargeau. The
country life, so foreign to her tastes, pressed upon her very heavily
at first, the more so as she was deserted by most of her friends.
"I received more compliments than visits," she writes. "I had made
everybody ill. All those who did not dare send me word that they feared
to embroil themselves with the court pretended that some malady or
accident had befallen them." By degrees, however, she adapted herself to
her situation, and in her loneliness and disappointment betook herself
to pursuits which offered a strong contrast to the dazzling succession
of magnificent fetes and military episodes which had given variety and
excitement to her life at the Tuileries. When she grew tired of her
parrots, her dogs, her horses, her comedians and her violin, she found
solace in literature, beginning the "Memoirs," which were finished
thirty years later, and writing romances, after the manner of Mlle. de
Scudery. The drift of the first one, "Les Nouvelles Francaises et les
Divertissements de la Princesse Aurelie," is suggested by its title. It
was woven from the little stories or adventures which were told to
amuse their solitude by the small coterie of women who had followed the
clouded fortunes of Mademoiselle. A romance of more pretension was the
"Princesse de Paphlagonie," in which the writer pictures her own little
court, and introduces many of its members under fictitious names.
These romances have small interest for the world today, but the exalted
position of their author and their personal character made them much
talked of in their time.

It was in quite another fashion, however, that the Grande Mademoiselle
made her most important contribution to literature. One day in 1657,
while still in the country, she proposed to her friends to make pen
portraits of themselves, and set the fashion by writing her own, with a
detailed description of her physical, mental, and moral qualities. This
was followed by carefully drawn pictures of others, among whom were
Louis XIV, Monsieur, and the Grand Conde. All were bound in honor to
give the lights and shadows with the same fidelity, though it would be
hardly wise to call them to too strict an account on this point. As may
be readily imagined, the result was something piquant and original. That
the amusement was a popular one goes without saying. People like to talk
of themselves, not only because the subject is interesting, but because
it gives them an opportunity of setting in relief their virtues and
tempering their foibles. They like also to know what others think of
them--at least, what others say of them. It is too much to expect of
human nature, least of all, of French human nature, that an agreeable
modicum of subtle flattery should not be added under such conditions.

When Mademoiselle opened her salon in the Luxembourg, on her return from
exile, these portraits formed one of its most marked features. The salon
was limited mainly to the nobility, with the addition of a few men
of letters. Among those who frequented it on intimate terms were the
Marquise de Sable, the Comtesse de Maure, the beautiful and pure-hearted
Mme. de Hautefort, the dame d'honneur of Anne of Austria, so hopelessly
adored by Louis XIII, and Mme. de Choisy, the witty wife of the
chancellor of the Duc d'Orleans. Its most brilliant lights were Mme. de
Sevigne, Mme. de La Fayette, and La Rochefoucauld. It was here that Mme.
de La Fayette made the vivid portrait of her friend Mme. de Sevigne. "It
flatters me," said the latter long afterwards, "but those who loved me
sixteen years ago may have thought it true." The beautiful Comtesse
de Bregy, who was called one of the muses of the time, portrayed the
Princess Henrietta and the irrepressible Queen Christine of Sweden.
Mme. de Chatillon, known later as the Duchesse de Mecklenbourg, who was
mingled with all the intrigues of this period, traces a very agreeable
sketch of herself, which may serve as a specimen of this interesting
diversion. After minutely describing her person, which she evidently
regards with much complacence, she continues:

"I have a temper naturally cheerful and a little given to raillery; but
I correct this inclination, for fear of displeasing. I have much esprit,
and enter agreeably into conversation. I have a pleasant voice and a
modest air. I am very sincere and do not fail my friends. I have not
a trifling mind, nor do I cherish a thousand small malices against my
neighbor. I love glory and fine actions. I have heart and ambition. I
am very sensitive to good and ill, but I never avenge myself for the
ill that has been done me, although I might have the inclination; I am
restrained by self-love. I have a sweet disposition, take pleasure in
serving my friends, and fear nothing so much as the petty drawing-room
quarrels which usually grow out of little nothings. I find my person
and my temper constructed something after this fashion; and I am so
satisfied with both, that I envy no one. I leave to my friends or to my
enemies the care of seeking my faults."

It was under this stimulating influence that La Rochefoucauld made the
well-known pen-portrait of himself. "I will lack neither boldness
to speak as freely as I can of my good qualities," he writes, "nor
sincerity to avow frankly that I have faults." After describing his
person, temper, abilities, passions, and tastes, he adds with curious
candor: "I am but little given to pity, and do not wish to be so at all.
Nevertheless there is nothing I would not do for an afflicted person;
and I sincerely believe one should do all one can to show sympathy for
misfortune, as miserable people are so foolish that this does them the
greatest good in the world; but I also hold that we should be content
with expressing sympathy, and carefully avoid having any. It is a
passion that is wholly worthless in a well-regulated mind, that only
serves to weaken the heart, and should be left to people, who, never
doing anything from reason, have need of passion to stimulate their
actions. I love my friends; and I love them to such an extent that I
would not for a moment weigh my interest against theirs. I condescend
to them, I patiently endure their bad temper. But I do not make much of
their caresses, and I do not feel great uneasiness at their absence."

It would be interesting to quote in full this sample of the close and
not always flattering self-analysis so much in fashion, but its length
forbids. Its revelation of the hidden springs of character is at least
unique.

The poet Segrais, who was attached to Mademoiselle's household,
collected these graphic pictures for private circulation, but they were
so much in demand that they were soon printed for the public under
the title of "Divers Portraits." They served the double purpose of
furnishing to the world faithful delineations of many more or less
distinguished people and of setting a literary fashion. The taste for
pen-portraits, which originated in the romances of Mlle. de Scudery,
and received a fresh impulse from this novel and personal application,
spread rapidly among all classes. It was taken up by men of letters
and men of the world, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie. There were
portraits of every grade of excellence and every variety of people,
until they culminated, some years later in "Les Caracteres" of La
Bruyere, who dropped personalities and gave them the form of permanent
types. It is a literature peculiarly adapted to the flexibility and fine
perception of the French mind, and one in which it has been preeminent,
from the analytic but diffuse Mlle. de Scudery, and the clear, terse,
spirited Cardinal de Retz, to the fine, penetrating, and exquisitely
finished Sainte-Beuve, the prince of modern critics and literary
artists. It was this skill in vivid delineation that gave such point
and piquancy to the memoirs of the period, which are little more than
a series of brilliant and vigorous sketches of people outlined upon a
shifting background of events. In this rapid characterization the French
have no rivals. It is the charm of their fiction as well as of their
memoirs. Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Daudet, are the natural successors of
La Bruyere and Saint-Simon.

The marriage of Louis XIV shattered one of the most brilliant illusions
of the Grande Mademoiselle, and it was about this time that she wrote
a characteristic letter to Mme. de Motteville, picturing an Arcadia in
some beautiful forest, where people are free to do as they like. The
most ardent apostle of socialism could hardly dream of an existence more
democratic or more Utopian. These favored men and women lead a simple,
pastoral life. They take care of the house and the garden, milk the
cows, make cheese and cakes, and tend sheep on pleasant days. But this
rustic community must have its civilized amusements. They visit, drive,
ride on horseback, paint, design, play on the lute or clavecin, and have
all the new books sent to them. After reading the lives of heroes and
philosophers, the princess is convinced that no one is perfectly happy,
and that Christianity is desirable, as it gives hope for the future.
Her platonic and Christian republic is composed of "amiable and perfect
people," but it is quite free from the entanglements of love and the
"vulgar institution of marriage." Mme. de Motteville replies very
gracefully, accepting many of these ideas, but as it is difficult to
repress love altogether, she thinks "one will be obliged to permit that
error which an old custom has rendered legitimate, and which is called
marriage." This curious correspondence takes its color from the Spanish
pastorals which tinged the romantic literature of the time as well as
its social life. The long letters, carefully written on large and heavy
sheets yellow with age, have a peculiarly old-time flavor, and throw
a vivid light upon the woman who could play the role of a heroine of
Corneille or of a sentimental shepherdess, as the caprice seized her.

A tragical bit of romance colored the mature life of the Grande
Mademoiselle. She had always professed a great aversion to love,
regarding it as "unworthy of a well-ordered soul." She even went so far
as to say that it was better to marry from reason or any other thing
imaginable, dislike included, than from passion that was, in any case,
short-lived. But this princess of intrepid spirit, versatile gifts,
ideal fancies, and platonic theories, who had aimed at an emperor and
missed a throne; this amazon, with her penchant for glory and contempt
for love, forgot all her sage precepts, and at forty-two fell a victim
to a violent passion for the Comte de Lauzun. She has traced its course
to the finest shades of sentiment. Her pride, her infatuation, her
scruples, her new-born humility--we are made familiar with them
all, even to the finesse of her respectful adorer, and the reluctant
confession of love which his discreet silence wrings from her at last..
Her royal cousin, after much persuasion, consented to the unequal union.
The impression this affair made upon the world is vividly shown in a
letter written by Mme. de Sevigne to her daughter:

I am going to tell you a thing the most astonishing, the most
surprising, the most marvelous, the most miraculous, the most
triumphant, the most astounding, the most unheard of, the most singular,
the most extraordinary, the most incredible, the most unexpected, the
grandest, the smallest, the rarest, the most common, the most dazzling,
the most secret even until today, the most brilliant, the most worthy of
envy.... a thing in fine which is to be done Sunday, when those who see
it will believe themselves dazed; a thing which is to be done Sunday
and which will not perhaps have been done Monday... M. de Lauzun marries
Sunday, at the Louvre--guess whom?... He marries Sunday at the Louvre,
with the permission of the King, Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle de,
Mademoiselle; guess the name; he marries Mademoiselle, MA FOI, PAR MA
FOI, MA FOI JUREE, Mademoiselle, la grande Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle,
daughter of the late Monsieur, Mademoiselle, grand-daughter of Henry IV,
Mademoiselle d'Eu, Mademoiselle de Dombes, Mademoiselle de Montpensier,
Mademoiselle d'Orleans, Mademoiselle, cousin of the king, Mademoiselle,
destined to the throne, Mademoiselle, the only parti in France worthy of
Monsieur. VOILA a fine subject for conversation. If you cry out, if you
are beside yourself, if you say that we have deceived you, that it is
false, that one trifles with you, that it is a fine bit of raillery,
that it is very stupid to imagine, if, in fine, you abuse us, we shall
find that you are right; we have done as much ourselves.

In spite of the prudent warnings of her friends, the happy princess
could not forego the eclat of a grand wedding, and before the hasty
arrangements were concluded, the permission was withdrawn. Her tears,
her entreaties, her cries, her rage, and her despair, were of no avail.
Louis XIV took her in his arms, and mingled his tears with hers,
even reproaching her for the two or three days of delay; but he was
inexorable. Ten years of loyal devotion to her lover, shortly afterward
imprisoned at Pignerol, and of untiring efforts for his release which
was at last secured at the cost of half her vast estates, ended in a
brief reunion. A secret marriage, a swift discovery that her idol was
of very common clay, abuse so violent that she was obliged to forbid
him forever her presence, and the disenchantment was complete. The sad
remnant of her existence was devoted to literature and to conversation;
the latter she regarded as "the greatest pleasure in life, and almost
the only one." When she died, the Count de Lauzun wore the deepest
mourning, had portraits of her everywhere, and adopted permanently the
subdued colors that would fitly express the inconsolable nature of his
grief.

Without tact or fine discrimination, the Grande Mademoiselle was a woman
of generous though undisciplined impulses, loyal disposition, and pure
character; but her egotism was colossal. Under different conditions,
one might readily imagine her a second Joan of Arc, or a heroine of the
Revolution. She says of herself: "I know not what it is to be a heroine;
I am of a birth to do nothing that is not grand or elevated. One may
call that what one likes. As for myself, I call it to follow my own
inclination and to go my own way. I am not born to take that of others."
She lacked the measure, the form, the delicacy of the typical precieuse;
but her quick, restless intellect and ardent imagination were swift
to catch the spirit of the Hotel de Rambouillet, and to apply it in an
original fashion. Though many subjects were interdicted in her salon,
and many people were excluded, it gives us interesting glimpses into
the life of the literary noblesse, and furnishes a complete gallery
of pen-portraits of more or less noted men and women. With all the
brilliant possibilities of her life, it was through the diversion of her
idle hours that this princess, author, amazon, prospective queen, and
disappointed woman has left the most permanent trace upon the world.




CHAPTER V. A LITERARY SALON AT PORT ROYAL

_Mme. de Sable--Her Worldly Life--Her Retreat--Her Friends--Pascal--The
Maxims of La Rochefoucauld--Last Days of the Marquise_

The transition from the restless character and stormy experiences of the
Grande Mademoiselle, to the gentler nature and the convent salon of
her friend and literary confidante, Mme. de Sable, is a pleasant one.
Perhaps no one better represents the true precieuse of the seventeenth
century, the happy blending of social savoir-faire with an amiable
temper and a cultivated intellect. Without the genius of Mme. de Sevigne
or Mme. de La Fayette, without the force or the rare attractions of
Mme. de Longueville, without the well-poised character and catholic
sympathies of Mme. de Rambouillet, she played an important part in the
life of her time, through her fine insight and her consummate tact in
bringing together the choicest spirits, and turning their thoughts into
channels that were fresh and unworn. Born in 1599, Madeleine de Souvre
passed her childhood in Touraine, of which province her father was
governor. In the brilliancy of her youth, we find her in Paris among the
early favorites of the Hotel de Rambouillet, and on terms of lifelong
intimacy with its hostess and her daughter Julie. Beautiful, versatile,
generous, but fastidious and exacting in her friendships, with a dash
of coquetry--inevitable when a woman is fascinating and French--she
repeated the oft-played role of a mariage de convenance at sixteen, a
few brilliant years of social triumphs marred by domestic neglect
and suffering, a period of enforced seclusion after the death of her
unworthy husband, a brief return to the world, and an old age of mild
and comfortable devotion.

"The Marquise de Sable," writes Mme. de Motteville, "was one of those
whose beauty made the most sensation when the Queen (Anne of Austria)
came into France. But if she was amiable, she desired still more to
appear so. Her self-love rendered her a little too sensible to that
which men professed for her. There was still in France some remnant of
the politeness which Catherine de Medicis had brought from Italy, and
Mme. de Sable found so much delicacy in the new dramas, as well as
in other works, in prose and verse, which came from Madrid, that she
conceived a high idea of the gallantry which the Spaniards had learned
from the Moors. She was persuaded that men may without wrong have tender
sentiments for women; that the desire of pleasing them leads men to the
greatest and finest actions, arouses their spirit, and inspires them
with liberality and all sorts of virtues; but that, on the other side,
women, who are the ornaments of the world, and made to be served and
adored, ought to permit only respectful attentions. This lady, having
sustained her views with much talent and great beauty, gave them
authority in her time."

The same writer says that she has "much light and sincerity," with
"penetration enough to unfold all the secrets of one's heart."

Mlle. de Scudery introduces her in the "Grand Cyrus," as Parthenie, "a
tall and graceful woman, with fine eyes, the most beautiful throat in
the world, a lovely complexion, blonde hair, and a pleasant mouth,
with a charming air, and a fine and eloquent smile, which expresses the
sweetness or the bitterness of her soul." She dwells upon her surprising
and changeful beauty, upon the charm of her conversation, the variety
of her knowledge, the delicacy of her tact, and the generosity of her
tender and passionate heart. One may suspect this portrait of being
idealized, but it seems to have been in the main correct.

Of her husband we know very little, excepting that he belonged to
the family of Montmorency, passed from violent love to heart-breaking
indifference, and died about 1640, leaving her with four children and
shattered fortunes. To recruit her failing health, and to hide her
chagrin and sorrow at seeing herself supplanted by unworthy rivals, she
had lived for some time in the country, where she had leisure for the
reading and reflection which fitted her for her later life. But after
the death of her husband she was obliged to sell her estates, and we
find her established in the Place Royale with her devoted friend,
the Comtesse de Maure, and continuing the traditions of the Hotel de
Rambouillet. Her tastes had been formed in this circle, and she had also
been under the instruction of the Chevalier de Mere, a litterateur and
courtier who had great vogue, was something of an oracle, and molded the
character and manners of divers women of this period, among others the
future Mme. de Maintenon. His confidence in his own power of bringing
talent out of mediocrity was certainly refreshing. Among his pupils was
the Duchesse de Lesdiguieres, who said to him one day, "I wish to have
esprit."--"Eh bien, Madame," replied the complaisant chevalier, "you
shall have it."

How much Mme. de Sable may have been indebted to this modest bel esprit
we do not know, but her finished manner, fine taste, exquisite tact,
cultivated intellect, and great experience of the world made her an
authority in social matters. To be received in her salon was to be
received everywhere. Cardinal Mazarin watched her influence with a
jealous eye. "Mme. de Longueville is very intimate with the Marquise de
Sable," he writes in his private note book. "She is visited constantly
by D'Andilly, the Princesse de Guemene, d'Enghien and his sister,
Nemours, and many others. They speak freely of all the world. It is
necessary to have some one who will advise us of all that passes there."

But the death of her favorite son--a young man distinguished for graces
of person, mind, heart, and character, who lost his life in one of the
battles of his friend and comrade, the Prince de Conde--together
with the loss of her fortune and the fading of her beauty, turned the
thoughts of the Marquise to spiritual things. We find many traces of the
state of mind which led her first into a mild form of devotion, serious
but not too ascetic, and later into pronounced Jansenism. In a note to
a friend who had neglected her, she dwells upon "the misery and
nothingness of the world," recalls the strength of their long
friendship, the depth of her own affection, and tries to account for the
disloyalty to herself, by the inherent weakness and emptiness of human
nature, which renders it impossible for even the most perfect to do
anything that is not defective. All this is very charitable, to say the
least, as well as a little abstract. Time has given a strange humility
and forgivingness to the woman who broke with her dearest friend, the
unfortunate Duc de Montmorency, because he presumed to lift his eyes
to the Queen, saying that she "could not receive pleasantly the regards
which she had to share with the greatest princess in the world."

The fashion of the period furnished a peaceful and dignified refuge for
women, when their beauty waned and the "terrible forties" ended their
illusions. To go into brief retreat for penitence and prayer was at all
times a graceful thing to do, besides making for safety. It was only a
step further to retire altogether from the scenes of pleasure which
had begun to pall. The convent offered a haven of repose to the bruised
heart, a fresh aim for drooping energies, a needed outlet for devouring
emotions, and a comfortable sense of security, not only for this world,
but for the next. It was the next world which was beginning to trouble
Mme. de Sable. She had great fear of death, and after many penitential
retreats to Port Royal, she finally obtained permission to build a suite
of apartments within its precincts, and retired there about 1655 to
prepare for that unpleasant event which she put off as long as possible
by the most assiduous care of her health. "If she was not devoted, she
had the idea of becoming so," said Mademoiselle. But her devotion was
in quite a mundane fashion. Her pleasant rooms were separate and
independent, thus enabling her to give herself not only to the care of
her health and her soul, but to a select society, to literature, and to
conversation. She never practiced the severe asceticism of her friend,
Mme. de Longueville. With a great deal of abstract piety, the iron
girdle and the hair shirt were not included. She did not even forego
her delicate and fastidious tastes. Her elegant dinners and her dainty
comfitures were as famous as ever. "Will the anger of the Marquise go so
far, in your opinion, as to refuse me her recipe for salad?" writes Mme.
de Choisy at the close of a letter to the Comtesse de Maure, in which
she has ridiculed her friend's Jansenist tendencies; "If so, it will be
a great inhumanity, for which she will be punished in this world and the
other." She had great skill in delicate cooking, and was in the habit of
sending cakes, jellies, and other dainties, prepared by herself, to her
intimate friends. La Rochefoucauld says, "If I could hope for two dishes
of those preserves, which I did not deserve to eat before, I should be
indebted to you all my life." Mme. de Longueville, who is about to
visit her, begs her not to give a feast as she has "scruples about such
indulgence."

This spice of worldliness very much tempered the austerity of her
retreat, and lent an added luster to its intellectual attractions. But
the Marquise had many conflicts between her luxurious tastes and her
desire to be devout. Her dainty and epicurean habits, her extraordinary
anxiety about her health, and her capricious humors were the subject of
much light badinage among her friends. The Grande Mademoiselle sketches
these traits with a satiric touch in the "Princesse de Paphlagonie,"
where she introduces her with the Comtesse de Maure. "There are no hours
when they do not confer together upon the means of preventing themselves
from dying, and upon the art of rendering themselves immortal," she
writes. "Their conferences are not like those of other people; the fear
of breathing an air too cold or too hot, the apprehension that the wind
may be too dry or too damp, a fancy that the weather is not as moderate
as they judge necessary for the preservation of their health--these are
sufficient reasons for writing from one room to another...." If one could
find this correspondence, one might derive great advantages in every
way; for they were princesses who had nothing mortal, except the
knowledge of being so... Of Mme. de Sable she adds: "The Princess
Parthenie had a taste as dainty as her mind; nothing equaled the
magnificence of her entertainments; all the viands were exquisite, and
her elegance was beyond anything that one could imagine." The fastidious
Marquise suffered, with all the world, from the defects of her
qualities. Her extreme delicacy and sensibility appear under many forms
and verge often upon weakness; but it is an amiable weakness that does
not detract greatly from her fascination. She was not cast in a heroic
mold, and her faults are those which the world is pleased to call
essentially feminine.

The records of her life were preserved by Conrart, also by her friend
and physician, Valant. They give us a clear picture of her character,
with its graces and its foibles, as well as of her pleasant intercourse
and correspondence with many noted men and women. They give us,
too, interesting glimpses of her salon. We find there the celebrated
Jansenists Nicole and Arnauld, the eminent lawyer Domat, Esprit,
sometimes Pascal, with his sister, Mme. Perier; the Prince and Princesse
de Conti, the Grand Conde, La Rochefoucauld, the penitent Mme. de
Longueville, Mme. de La Fayette, and many others among the cultivated
noblesse, who are attracted by its tone of bel esprit and graceful,
but by no means severe, devotion. The Duc d'Orleans and the lovely but
unfortunate Madame were intimate and frequent visitors.

In this little world, in which religion, literature, and fashion are
curiously blended, they talk of theology, morals, physics, Cartesianism,
friendship, and love. The youth and gaiety of the Hotel de Rambouillet
have given place to more serious thoughts and graver topics. The current
which had its source there is divided. At the Samedis, in the Marais,
they are amusing themselves about the same time with letters and Vers de
Societe. At the Luxembourg, a more exclusive coterie is exercising its
mature talent in sketching portraits. These salons touch at many points,
but each has a channel of its own. The reflective nature of Mme. de
Sable turns to more serious and elevated subjects, and her friends take
the same tone. They make scientific experiments, discuss Calvinism, read
the ancient moralists, and indulge in dissertations upon a great variety
of topics. Mme. de Bregy, poet, dame d'honneur and femme d'esprit,
who amused the little court of Mademoiselle with so many discreetly
flattering pen-portraits, has left two badly written and curiously
spelled notes upon the merits of Socrates and Epictetus, which throw a
ray of light upon the tastes of this aristocratic and rather speculative
circle. Mme. de Sable writes an essay upon the education of children,
which is very much talked about, also a characteristic paper upon
friendship. The latter is little more than a series of detached
sentences, but it indicates the drift of her thought, and might have
served as an antidote to the selfish philosophy of La Rochefoucauld. It
calls out an appreciative letter from d'Andilly, who, in his anchorite's
cell, continues to follow the sayings and doings of his friends in the
little salon at Port Royal.

"Friendship," she writes, "is a kind of virtue which can only be founded
upon the esteem of people whom one loves--that is to say, upon qualities
of the soul, such as fidelity, generosity, discretion, and upon fine
qualities of mind."

After insisting that it must be reciprocal, disinterested, and
based upon virtue, she continues: "One ought not to give the name of
friendship to natural inclinations because they do not depend upon
our will or our choice; and, though they render our friendships more
agreeable, they should not be the foundation of them. The union which
is founded upon the same pleasures and the same occupations does not
deserve the name of friendship because it usually comes from a certain
egotism which causes us to love that which is similar to ourselves,
however imperfect we may be." She dwells also upon the mutual offices
and permanent nature of true friendship, adding, "He who loves his
friend more than reason and justice, will on some other occasion love
his own pleasure and profit more than his friend."

The Abbe Esprit, Jansenist and academician, wrote an essay upon "Des
Amities en Apparence les Plus Saints des Hommes avec les Femmes," which
was doubtless suggested by the conversations in this salon, where the
subject was freely discussed. The days of chivalry were not so far
distant, and the subtle blending of exalted sentiment with thoughtful
companionship, which revived their spirit in a new form, was too
marked a feature of the time to be overlooked. These friendships, half
intellectual, half poetic, and quite platonic, were mostly formed in
mature life, on a basis of mental sympathy. "There is a taste in pure
friendship which those who are born mediocre do not reach," said La
Gruyere. Mme. de Lambert speaks of it as "the product of a perfect
social culture, and, of all affections, that which has most charm."

The well-known friendship of Mme. de La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld,
which illustrates the mutual influence of a critical man of intellect
and a deep-hearted, thoughtful woman who has passed the age of romance,
began in this salon. Its nature was foreshadowed in the tribute La
Rochefoucauld paid to women in his portrait of himself. "Where their
intellect is cultivated," he writes, "I prefer their society to that
of men. One finds there a gentleness one does not meet with among
ourselves; and it seems to me, beyond this, that they express themselves
with more neatness, and give a more agreeable turn to the things they
talk about."

Mme. de Sable was herself, in less exclusive fashion, the intimate
friend and adviser of Esprit, d'Andilly, and La Rochefoucauld. The
letters of these men show clearly their warm regard as well as the value
they attached to her opinions. "Indeed," wrote Voiture to her many years
before, "those who decry you on the side of tenderness must confess that
if you are not the most loving person in the world, you are at least the
most obliging. True friendship knows no more sweetness than there is in
your words." Her character, so delicately shaded and so averse to all
violent passions, seems to have been peculiarly fitted for this calm and
enduring sentiment which cast a soft radiance, as of Indian summer, over
her closing years.

At a later period, the sacred name of friendship was unfortunately used
to veil relations that had lost all the purity and delicacy of their
primitive character. This fact has sometimes been rather illogically
cited, as an argument not only against the moral influence of the salons
but against the intellectual development of women. There is neither
excuse nor palliation to be offered for the Italian manners and the
recognized system of amis intimes, which disgraced the French society
the next century. But, while it is greatly to be deplored that the moral
sense has not always kept pace with the cultivation of the intellect,
there is no reason for believing that license of manners is in any
degree the result of it. There is striking evidence to the contrary, in
the incredible ignorance and laxity that found its reaction in the early
salons; also in the dissolute lives of many distinguished women of rank
who had no pretension to wit or education. The fluctuation of morals,
which has always existed, must be traced to quite other causes. Virtue
has not invariably accompanied intelligence, but it has been still less
the companion of ignorance.

It was Mme. de Sable who set the fashion of condensing the thoughts and
experiences of life into maxims and epigrams. This was her specific
gift to literature; but her influence was felt through what she inspired
others to do rather than through what she did herself. It was her good
fortune to be brought into contact with the genius of a Pascal and a
La Rochefoucauld,--men who reared immortal works upon the pastime of
an idle hour. One or two of her own maxims will suffice to indicate her
style as well as to show the estimate she placed upon form and measure
in the conduct of life:

A bad manner spoils everything, even justice and reason. The HOW
constitutes the best part of things, and the air which one gives them
gilds, modifies, and softens the most disagreeable.

There is a certain command in the manner of speaking and acting, which
makes itself felt everywhere, and which gains, in advance, consideration
and respect.

We find here the spirit that underlies French manners, in which form
counts for so much.

There is another, which suggests the delicate flavor of sentiment then
in vogue:

Wherever it is, love is always the master. It seems truly that it is to
the soul of the one who loves, what the soul is to the body it animates.

Among the eminent men who lent so much brilliancy to this salon was
the great jurist Domat. He adds his contribution and falls into the
moralizing vein:

A little fine weather, a good word, a praise, a caress, draws me from
a profound sadness from which I could not draw myself by any effort
of meditation. What a machine is my soul, what an abyss of misery and
weakness!

Here is one by the Abbe d'Ailly, which foreshadows the thought of the
next century:

Too great submission to books, and to the opinions of the ancients,
as to the eternal truths revealed of God, spoils the head and makes
pedants.

The finest and most vigorous of these choice spirits was Pascal, who
frequented more or less the salon of Mme. de Sable previous to his final
retirement to the gloom and austerity of the cloister. His delicate
platonism and refined spirituality go far towards offsetting the cold
cynicism of La Rochefoucauld. Each gives us a different phase of life
as reflected in a clear and luminous intelligence. The one led to Port
Royal, the other turned an electric light upon the selfish corruption of
courts. Many of the pensees of Pascal were preserved among the records
of this salon, and Cousin finds reason for believing that they were
first suggested and discussed here; he even thinks it possible, if
not probable, that the "Discours sur les Passions de L'amour," which
pertains to his mundane life, and presents the grave and ascetic recluse
in a new light, had a like origin.

But the presiding genius was La Rochefoucauld. He complains that the
mode of relaxation is fatiguing, and that the mania for sentences
troubles his repose. The subjects were suggested for conversation, and
the thoughts were condensed and reduced to writing at leisure. "Here are
all the maxims I have," he writes to Mme. de Sable; "but as one gives
nothing for nothing, I demand a potage aux carottes, un ragout de
mouton, etc."

"When La Rochefoucauld had composed his sentences," says Cousin, "he
talked them over before or after dinner, or he sent them at the end of
a letter. They were discussed, examined, and observations were made,
by which he profited. One could lessen their faults, but one could lend
them no beauty. There was not a delicate and rare turn, a fine and keen
touch, which did not come from him."

After availing himself of the general judgment in this way, he took a
novel method of forestalling crtiticism before committing himself
to publication. Mme. de Sable sent a collection of the maxims to her
friends, asking for a written opinion. One is tempted to make long
extracts from their replies. The men usually indorse the worldly
sentiments, the women rarely. The Princesse de Guemene, who, in the
decline of her beauty, was growing devout, and also had apartments for
penitential retreat at Port Royal, responds: "I was just going to write
to beg you to send me your carriage as soon as you had dined. I have yet
seen only the first maxims, as I had a headache yesterday; but those I
have read appear to me to be founded more upon the disposition of
the author than upon the truth, for he believes neither in generosity
without interest, nor in pity; that is, he judges every one by himself.
For the greater number of people, he is right; but surely there are
those who desire only to do good." The Countesse de Maure, who does not
believe in the absolute depravity of human nature, and is inclined to an
elevated Christian philosophy quite opposed to Jansenism, writes with
so much severity that she begs her friend not to show her letter to the
author. Mme. de Hautefort expresses her disapproval of a theory which
drives honor and goodness out of the world. After many clever and
well-turned criticisms, she says: "But the maxim which is quite new to
me, and which I admire, is that idleness, languid as it is, destroys all
the passions. It is true, and he had searched his heart well to find a
sentiment so hidden, but so just... I think one ought, at present, to
esteem idleness as the only virtue in the world, since it is that which
uproots all the vices. As I have always had much respect for it, I
am glad it has so much merit." But she adds wisely: "If I were of the
opinion of the author, I would not bring to the light those mysteries
which will forever deprive him of all the confidence one might have in
him."

There is one letter, written by the clever and beautiful Eleonore de
Rohan, Abbess de Malnoue, and addressed to the author, which deserves to
be read for its fine and just sentiments. In closing she says:

The maxim upon humility appears to me perfectly beautiful; but I have
been so surprised to find it there, that I had the greatest difficulty
in recognizing it in the midst of all that precedes and follows it. It
is assuredly to make this virtue practiced among your own sex, that you
have written maxims in which their self-love is so little flattered.
I should be very much humiliated on my own part, if I did not say to
myself what I have already said to you in this note, that you judge
better the hearts of men than those of women, and that perhaps you do
not know yourself the true motive which makes you esteem them less. If
you had always met those whose temperament had been submitted to virtue,
and in whom the senses were less strong than reason, you would think
better of a certain number who distinguish themselves always from the
multitude; and it seems to me that Mme. de La Fayette and myself deserve
that you should have a better opinion of the sex in general.

Mme. de La Fayette writes to the Marquise: "All people of good sense are
not so persuaded of the general corruption as is M. de La Rochefoucauld.
I return to you a thousand thanks for all you have done for this
gentleman."--At a later period she said: "La Rochefoucauld stimulated my
intellect, but I reformed his heart." It is to be regretted that he had
not known her sooner.

At his request Mme. de Sable wrote a review of the maxims, which she
submitted to him for approval. It seems to have been a fair presentation
of both sides, but he thought it too severe, and she kindly gave him
permission to change it to suit himself. He took her at her word,
dropped the adverse criticisms, retained the eulogies, and published
it in the "Journal des Savants" as he wished it to go to the world. The
diplomatic Marquise saved her conscience and kept her friend.

The maxims of La Rochefoucauld, which are familiar to all, have extended
into a literature. That he generalized from his own point of view, and
applied to universal humanity the motives of a class bent upon favor
and precedence, is certainly true. But whatever we may think of his
sentiments, which were those of a man of the world whose observations
were largely in the atmosphere of courts, we are compelled to admit
his unrivaled finish and perfection of form. Similar theories of human
nature run through the maxims of Esprit and Saint Evremond, without
the exquisite turn which makes each one of La Rochefoucauld's a gem in
itself. His tone was that of a disappointed courtier, with a vein of
sadness only half disguised by cold philosophy and bitter cynicism. La
Bruyere, with a broader outlook upon humanity, had much of the same fine
analysis, with less conciseness and elegance of expression. Vauvenargues
and Joubert were his legitimate successors. But how far removed in
spirit!

"The body has graces," writes Vauvenargues, "the mind has talents; has
the heart only vices? And man capable of reason, shall he be incapable
of virtue?"

With a fine and delicate touch, Joubert says: "Virtue is the health of
the soul. It gives a flavor to the smallest leaves of life."

These sentiments are in the vein of Pascal, who represents the most
spiritual element of the little coterie which has left such a legacy of
condensed thought to the world.

The crowning act of the life of Mme. de Sable was her defense of Port
Royal. She united with Mme. de Longueville in protecting the persecuted
Jansenists, Nicole and Arnauld, but she had neither the courage, the
heroism, nor the partisan spirit of her more ardent companion. With all
her devotion she was something of a sybarite and liked repose. She had
the tact, during all the troubles which scattered her little circle, to
retain her friends, of whatever religious color, though not without a
few temporary clouds. Her diplomatic moderation did not quite please the
religieuses of Port Royal, and chilled a little her pleasant relations
with d'Andilly.

Toward the close of her life, the Marquise was in the habit of secluding
herself for days together, and declining to see even her dearest
friends. The Abbe de la Victoire, piqued at not being received, spoke of
her one day as "the late Mme. la Marquise de Sable."

La Rochefoucauld writes to her, "I know no more inventions for entering
your house; I am refused at the door every day." Mme. de La Fayette
declares herself offended, and cites this as a proof of her attachment,
saying, "There are very few people who could displease me by not wishing
to see me." But the friends of the Marquise are disposed to treat her
caprices very leniently. As the years went by and the interests of
life receded, Mme. de Sable became reconciled to the thought that had
inspired her with so much dread. When she died at the advanced age of
seventy-nine, the longed-for transition was only the quiet passing from
fevered dreams to peaceful sleep.

It is a singular fact that this refined, exclusive, fastidious woman, in
whom the artistic nature was always dominant to the extent of weakness,
should have left a request to be buried, without ceremony, in the parish
cemetery with the people, remote alike from the tombs 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
world is reflected in a thousand varying colors. The sparkling wit,
the swift judgment, the subtle insight, the lightness of touch, the
indefinable charm of style--these belong to her temperament and her
genius. But the clearness, the justness of expression, the precision,
the simplicity that was never banal--such qualities nature does
not bestow. One must find their source in careful training, in wise
criticism, in early familiarity with good models.

Living from 1626 to 1696, Mme. de Sevigne was en rapport with the best
life of the great century of French letters. She was the granddaughter
of the mystical Mme. de Chantal, who was too much occupied with her
convents and her devotions to give much attention to the little Marie,
left an orphan at the age of six years. The child did not inherit much
of her grandmother's spirit of reverence, and at a later period was wont
to indulge in many harmless pleasantries about her pious ancestress and
"our grandfather, St. Francois de Sales." Deprived so early of the
care of a mother, she was brought up by an uncle, the good Abbe de
Coulanges--the "Bien-Bon"--whose life was devoted to her interests.
Though born in the Place Royale, that long-faded center of so much that
was brilliant and fascinating two centuries ago, much of her youth was
passed in the family chateau at Livry, where she was carefully educated
in a far more solid fashion than was usual among the women of her time.
She had an early introduction to the Hotel de Rambouillet, and readily
caught its intellectual tastes, though she always retained a certain
bold freedom of speech and manners, quite opposed to its spirit.

Her instructors were Chapelain and Menage, both honored habitues of that
famous salon. The first was a dull poet, a profound scholar, somewhat of
a pedant, and notoriously careless in his dress--le vieux Chapelain,
his irreverent pupil used to call him. When he died of apoplexy, years
afterwards, she wrote to her daughter: "He confesses by pressing the
hand; he is like a statue in his chair. So God confounds the pride of
philosophers." But he taught her Latin, Spanish, and Italian, made her
familiar with the beauties of Virgil and Tasso, and gave her a critical
taste for letters.

Menage was younger, and aspired to be a man of the world as well as a
savant. Repeating one day the remark of a friend, that out of ten things
he knew he had learned nine in conversation, he added, "I could say
about the same thing myself"--a confession that savors more of the
salon than of the library. He had a good deal of learning, but much
pretension, and Moliere has given him an undesirable immortality as
Vadius in "Les Femmes Savantes," in company with his deadly enemy, the
Abbe Cotin, who figures as "Trissotin." It appears that the susceptible
savant lost his heart to his lively pupil, and sighed not only in secret
but quite openly. He wrote her bad verses in several languages, loaded
her with eulogies, and followed her persistently. "The name of Mme.
de Sevigne," said the Bishop of Laon, "is in the works of Menage what
Bassan's dog is in his portraits. He cannot help putting it there." She
treated him in a sisterly fashion that put to flight all sentimental
illusions, but she had often to pacify his wounded vanity. One day, in
the presence of several friends, she gave him a greeting rather more
cordial than dignified. Noticing the looks of surprise, she turned away
laughing and said, "So they kissed in the primitive church." But the
wide knowledge and scholarly criticism of Menage were of great value to
the versatile woman, who speedily surpassed her master in style if not
in learning. Evidently she appreciated him, since she addressed him in
one of her letters as "friend of all friends, the best."

At eighteen the gay and unconventional Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was
married to the Marquis de Sevigne; but her period of happiness was a
short one. The husband, who was rich, handsome, and agreeable, proved
weak and faithless. He was one of the temporary caprices of the
dangerous Ninon, led a dashing, irresponsible life, spent his fortune
recklessly, and left his pretty young wife to weep alone at a convenient
distance, under the somber skies of Brittany. Fortunately for her and
for posterity, his career was rapid and brief. For some trifling affair
of so-called honor--a quality of which, from our point of view, he
does not seem to have possessed enough to be worth the trouble of
defending--he had the kindness to get himself killed in a duel, after
seven years of marriage. His spirited wife had loved him sincerely, and
first illusions die slowly. She shed many bitter and natural tears, but
she never showed any disposition to repeat the experiment. Perhaps she
was of the opinion of another young widow who thought it "a fine thing
to bear the name of a man who can commit no more follies." But it is
useless to speculate upon the reasons why a woman does or does not
marry. It is certain that the love of her two children filled the heart
of Mme. de Sevigne; her future life was devoted to their training, and
to repairing a fortune upon which her husband's extravagance had made
heavy inroads.

But the fascinating widow of twenty-five had a dangerous path to
tread. That she lived in a society so lax and corrupt, unprotected and
surrounded by distinguished admirers, without a shadow of suspicion
having fallen upon her fair reputation is a strong proof of her good
judgment and her discretion. She was not a great beauty, though the
flattering verses of her poet friends might lead one to think so. A
complexion fresh and fair, eyes of remarkable brilliancy, an abundance
of blond hair, a face mobile and animated, and a fine figure--these were
her visible attractions. She danced well, sang well, talked well, and
had abounding health. Mme. de La Fayette made a pen-portrait of her,
which was thought to be strikingly true. It was in the form of a letter
from an unknown man. A few extracts will serve to bring her more vividly
before us.

"Your mind so adorns and embellishes your person, that there is no one
in the world so fascinating when you are animated by a conversation from
which constraint is banished. All that you say has such a charm, and
becomes you so well, that the words attract the Smiles and the Graces
around you; the brilliancy of your intellect gives such luster to your
complexion and your eyes, that although it seems that wit should touch
only the ears, yours dazzles the sight.

"Your soul is great and elevated. You are sensitive to glory and to
ambition, and not less so to pleasures; you were born for them and they
seem to have been made for you... In a word, joy is the true state of
your soul, and grief is as contrary to it as possible. You are naturally
tender and impassioned; there was never a heart so generous, so noble,
so faithful... You are the most courteous and amiable person that ever
lived, and the sweet, frank air which is seen in all your actions makes
the simplest compliments of politeness seem from your lips protestations
of friendship."

Mlle. de Scudery sketches her as the Princesse Clarinte in "Clelie,"
concluding with these words: "I have never seen together so many
attractions, so much gaiety, so much coquetry, so much light, so much
innocence and virtue. No one ever understood better the art of having
grace without affectation, raillery without malice, gaiety without
folly, propriety without constraint, and virtue without severity."

Her malicious cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, who was piqued by her indifference,
and basely wished to avenge himself, said that her "warmth was in
her intellect;" that for a woman of quality she was too badine, too
economical, too keenly alive to her own interests; that she made
too much account of a few trifling words from the queen, and was too
evidently flattered when the king danced with her. This opinion of a
vain and jealous man is not entitled to great consideration, especially
when we recall that he had already spoken of her as "the delight of
mankind," and said that antiquity would have dressed altars for her
and she would "surely have been goddess of something." The most
incomprehensible page in her history is her complaisance towards the
persistent impertinences of this perfidious friend. The only solution of
it seems to lie in the strength of family ties, and in her unwillingness
to be on bad terms with one of her very few near relatives.
Bussy-Rabutin was handsome, witty, brilliant, a bel esprit, a member of
the Academie Francaise, and very much in love with his charming cousin,
who clearly appreciated his talents, if not his character. "You are the
fagot of my intellect," she says to him; but she forbids him to talk
of love. Unfortunately for himself, his vanity got the better of his
discretion. He wrote the "Histoire Amoureuse des Gauls," and raised such
a storm about his head by his attack upon many fair reputations, that,
after a few months of lonely meditation in the Bastille, he was exiled
from Paris for seventeen years. Long afterwards he repented the
unkind blow he had given to Mme. de Sevigne, confessed its injustice,
apologized, and made his peace. But the world is less forgiving, and
wastes little sympathy upon the base but clever and ambitious man who
was doomed to wear his restless life away in the uncongenial solitude of
his chateau.

Among the numerous adorers of Mme. de Sevigne were the Prince de Conti,
the witty Comte de Lude, the poet Segrais, Fouquet, and Turenne. Her
friendship for the last two seems to have been the most lively and
permanent. We owe to her sympathetic pen the best account of the death
of Turenne. Her devotion to the interests of Fouquet and his family
lasted though the many years of imprisonment that ended only with his
life. There was nothing of the spirit of the courtier in her generous
affection for the friends who were out of favor. The loyalty of her
character was notably displayed in her unwavering attachment to Cardinal
de Retz, during his long period of exile and misfortune, after the
Fronde.

But one must go outside the ordinary channels to find the veritable
romance of Mme. de Sevigne's life. Her sensibility lent itself with
great facility to impressions, and her gracious manners, her amiable
character, her inexhaustible fund of gaiety could not fail to bring her
a host of admirers. She had doubtless a vein of harmless coquetry, but
it was little more than the natural and variable grace of a frank and
sympathetic woman who likes to please, and who scatters about her the
flowers of a rich mind and heart, without taking violent passions too
seriously, if, indeed, she heeds them at all. Friendship, too, has
its shades, its subtleties, its half-perceptible and quite unconscious
coquetries. But the supreme passion of Mme. de Sevigne was her love
for her daughter. It was the exaltation of her mystical grandmother,
in another form. "To love as I love you makes all other friendships
frivolous," she writes. Whatever her gifts and attractions may have
been, she is known to the world mainly through this affection and the
letters which have immortalized it. Nowhere in literature has maternal
love found such complete and perfect expression. Nowhere do we find
a character so clearly self-revealed. Others have professed to unveil
their innermost lives, but there is always a suspicion of posing
in deliberate revelations. Mme. De Sevigne has portrayed herself
unconsciously. It is the experience of yesterday, the thought of today,
the hope of tomorrow, the love that is at once the joy and sorrow of all
the days, that are woven into a thousand varying but living forms. One
naturally seeks in the character of the daughter a key to the absorbing
sentiment which is the inspiration and soul of these letters; but one
does not find it there. More beautiful than her mother, more learned,
more accomplished, she lacked her sympathetic charm. Cold, reserved,
timid, and haughty, without vivacity and apparently without fine
sensibility, she was much admired but little loved by the world in which
she lived. "When you choose, you are adorable," wrote her mother; but
evidently she did not always so choose. Bussy-Rabutin says of her, "This
woman has esprit, but it is esprit soured and of insupportable egotism.
She will make as many enemies as her mother makes friends and adorers."
He did not like her, and one must again take his opinion with
reserve; but she says of herself that she is "of a temperament little
communicative." In her mature life she naively writes: "At first people
thought me amiable enough, but when they knew me better they loved me no
more." "The prettiest girl in France," whose beauty was expected to "set
the world on fire," created a mild sensation at court; was noticed by
the king, who danced with her, received her share of adulation, and
finally became the third wife of the Comte de Grignan, who carried her
off to Provence, to the lasting grief of her adoring mother, and to
the great advantage of posterity, which owes to this fact the series of
incomparable letters that made the fame of their writer, and threw so
direct and vivid a light upon an entire generation.

The world has been inclined to regard the son of Mme. de Sevigne as the
more lovable of her two children, but she doubtless recognized in his
light and inconsequent character many of the qualities of her husband
which had given her so much sorrow during the brief years of her
marriage. Amiable, affectionate, and not without talent, he was
nevertheless the source of many anxieties and little pride. He followed
in the footsteps of his father, and became a willing victim to the
fascinations of Ninon; he frequented the society of Champmesle, where he
met habitually Boileau and Racine. He recited well, had a fine literary
taste, much sensibility, and a gracious ease of manner that made him
many friends. "He was almost as much loved as I am," remarked the
brilliant Mme. de Coulanges, after accompanying him on a visit to
Versailles. He appealed to Mme. de La Fayette to use her influence with
his mother to induce her to pay his numerous debts. There is a touch of
satire in the closing line of the note in which she intercedes for him.
"The great friendship you have for Mme. de Grignan," she writes, "makes
it necessary to show some for her brother."--But we have glimpses of his
weakness and instability in many of his mother's intimate letters. In
the end, however, having exhausted the pleasures of life and felt the
bitterness of its disappointments, he took refuge in devotion, and died
in the odor of sanctity, after the example of his devout ancestress.

Mme. de Grignan certainly offered a more solid foundation for her
mother's confidence and affection. It is quite possible, too, that her
reserve concealed graces of character only apparent on a close intimacy.
But love does not wait for reasons, and this one had all the shades and
intensities of a passion, with few of its exactions. D'Andilly called
the mother a "pretty pagan," because she made such an idol of her
daughter. She sometimes has her own misgivings on the score of
religion. "I make this a little Trappe," she wrote from Livry, after the
separation. "I wish to pray to God and make a thousand reflections; but,
Ma pauvre chere, what I do better than all that is to think of you. ..
I see you, you are present to me, I think and think again of everything;
my head and my mind are racked; but I turn in vain, I seek in vain; the
dear child whom I love with so much passion is two hundred leagues away.
I have her no more. Then I weep without the power to help myself."
She rings the changes upon this inexhaustible theme. A responsive word
delights her; a brief silence terrifies her; a slight coldness plunges
her into despair. "I have an imagination so lively that uncertainty
makes me die," she writes. If a shadow of grief touches her idol, her
sympathies are overflowing. "You weep, my very dear child; it is an
affair for you; it is not the same thing for me, it is my temperament."

But though this love pulses and throbs behind all her letters, it does
not make up the substance of them. To amuse her daughter she gathers all
the gossip of the court, all the news of her friends; she keeps her au
courant with the most trifling as well as the most important events. Now
she entertains her with a witty description of a scene at Versailles, a
tragical adventure, a gracious word about Mme. Scarron, "who sups with
me every evening," a tender message from Mme. de La Fayette; now it is a
serious reflection upon the death of Turenne, a vivid picture of her own
life, a bit of philosophy, a spicy anecdote about a dying man who takes
forty cups of tea every morning, and is cured. A few touches lay bare a
character or sketch a vivid scene. It is this infinite variety of detail
that gives such historic value to her letters. In a correspondence so
intimate she has no interest to conciliate, no ends to gain. She is
simply a mirror in which the world about her is reflected.

But the most interesting thing we read in her letters is the life
and nature of the woman herself. She has a taste for society and for
seclusion, for gaiety and for thought, for friendship and for books. For
the moment each one seems dominant. "I am always of the opinion of the
one heard last," she says, laughing at her own impressibility. It is an
amiable admission, but she has very fine and rational ideas of her own,
notwithstanding. In books, for which she had always a passion, she
found unfailing consolation. Corneille and La Fontaine were her favorite
traveling companions. "I am well satisfied to be a substance that
thinks and reads," she says, finding her good uncle a trifle dull for
a compagnon de voyage. Her tastes were catholic. She read Astree with
delight, loved Petrarch, Ariosto, and Montaigne; Rabelais made her "die
of laughter," she found Plutarch admirable, enjoyed Tacitus as keenly as
did Mme. Roland a century later, read Josephus and Lucian, dipped into
the history of the crusades and of the iconoclasts, of the holy fathers
and of the saints. She preferred the history of France to that of Rome
because she had "neither relatives nor friends in the latter place."
She finds the music of Lulli celestial and the preaching of Bourdaloue
divine. Racine she did not quite appreciate. In his youth, she said he
wrote tragedies for Champmesle and not for posterity. Later she modified
her opinion, but Corneille held always the first place in her affection.
She had a great love for books on morals, read and reread the essays
of Nicole, which she found a perpetual resource against the ills of
life--even rain and bad weather. St. Augustine she reads with pleasure,
and she is charmed with Bossuet and Pascal; but she is not very devout,
though she often tries to be. There is a serious naivete in all her
efforts in this direction. She seems to have always one eye upon the
world while she prays, and she mourns over her own lack of devotion.
"I wish my heart were for God as it is for you," she writes to her
daughter. "I am neither of God nor of the devil," she says again; "that
state troubles me though, between ourselves, I find it the most natural
in the world." Her reason quickly pierces to the heart of superstition;
sometimes she cannot help a touch of sarcasm. "I fear that this trappe,
which wishes to pass humanity, may become a lunatic asylum," she says.
She believes little in saints and processions. Over the high altar of
her chapel she writes SOLI DEO HONOR ET GLORIA. "It is the way to make
no one jealous," she remarks.

She was rather inclined toward Jansenism, but she could not fathom all
the subtleties of her friends the Port Royalists, and begged them to
"have the kindness, out of pity for her, to thicken their religion a
little as it evaporated in so much reasoning." As she grows older the
tone of seriousness is more perceptible. "If I could only live two
hundred years," she writes, "it seems to me that I might be an admirable
person." The rationalistic tendencies of Mme. de Grignan give her some
anxiety, and she rallies her often upon the doubtful philosophy of her
PERE DESCARTES. She could not admit a theory which pretended to
prove that her dog Marphise had no soul, and she insisted that if the
Cartesians had any desire to go to heaven, it was out of curiosity.
"Talk to the Cardinal (de Retz) a little of your MACHINES; machines
that love, machines that have a choice for some one, machines that are
jealous, machines that fear. ALLEZ, ALLEZ, you are jesting! Descartes
never intended to make us believe all that."

In her youth Mme. de Sevigne did not like the country because it was
windy and spoiled her beautiful complexion; perhaps, too, because it
was lonely. But with her happy gift of adaptation she came to love
its tranquillity. She went often to the solitary old family chateau in
Brittany to make economies and to retrieve the fortune which suffered
successively from the reckless extravagance of her husband and son,
and from the expensive tastes of the Comte de Grignan, who was acting
governor of Provence, and lived in a state much too magnificent for
his resources. Of her life at The Rocks she has left us many exquisite
pictures. "I go out into the pleasant avenues; I have a footman who
follows me; I have books, I change place, I vary the direction of my
promenade; a book of devotion, a book of history; one changes from one
to the other; that gives diversion; one dreams a little of God, of his
providence; one possesses one's soul, one thinks of the future."

She embellishes her park, superintends the planting of trees, and "a
labyrinth from which one could not extricate one's self without the
thread of Ariadne;" she fills her garden with orange trees and jessamine
until the air is so perfumed that she imagines herself in Provence. She
sits in the shade and embroiders while her son "reads trifles, comedies
which he plays like Moliere, verses, romances, tales; he is very
amusing, he has esprit, he is appreciative, he entertains us." She notes
the changing color of the leaves, the budding of the springtime. "It
seems to me that in case of need I should know very well how to make a
spring," she writes. She loves too the "fine, crystal days of autumn."
Sometimes, in the evening, she has "gray-brown thoughts which grow black
at night," but she never dwells upon these. Her "habitual thought--that
which one must have for God, if one does his duty"--is for her daughter.
"My dear child," she writes, "it is only you that I prefer to the
tranquil repose I enjoy here."

If her own soul is open to us in all its variable and charming moods, we
also catch in her letters many unconscious reflections of her daughter's
character. She offers her a little needed worldly advice. "Try, my
child," she says, "to adjust yourself to the manners and customs of the
people with whom you live; adapt yourself to that which is not bad; do
not be disgusted with that which is only mediocre; make a pleasure
of that which is not ridiculous." She entreats her to love the little
Pauline and not to scold her, nor send her away to the convent as she
did her sister Marie-Blanche. With what infinite tenderness she always
speaks of this child, smiling at her small outbursts of temper, soothing
her little griefs, and giving wise counsels about her education.
Evidently she doubted the patience of the mother. "You do not yet too
well comprehend maternal love," she writes; "so much the better, my
child; it is violent."

Unfortunately this adoring mother could not get on very well with her
daughter when they were together. She drowned her with affection, she
fatigued her with care for her health, she was hurt by her ungracious
manner, she was frozen by her indifference in short, they killed each
other. It is not a rare thing to make a cult of a distant idol, and to
find one's self unequal to the perpetual shock of the small collisions
which diversities of taste and temperament render inevitable in daily
intercourse. In this instance, one can readily imagine that a love
so interwoven with every fiber of the mother's life, must have been a
little over-sensitive, a little exacting, a trifle too demonstrative for
the colder nature of the daughter; but that it was the less genuine and
profound, no one who has at all studied the character of Mme. de Sevigne
can for a moment imagine. How she suffers when it becomes necessary for
Mme. de Grignan to go back to Provence! How the tears flow! How readily
she forgives all, even to denying that there is anything 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 of the Hotel de Rambouillet. Mme. De
Sevigne, who had fine dramatic talent, acted here in little comedies.
She heard Boileau read his satires and Racine his tragedies. She met the
witty Chevalier de Chatillon, who asked eight days to make an impromptu,
and Pomponne, who wrote to his father that the great world he found
in this salon did not prevent him from appearing in a gray habit. In a
letter from the country house of Mme. Duplessis, at Fresnes, to the same
Pomponne, then ambassador to Sweden, Mme. de Sevigne says: "I have M.
d'Andilly at my left, that is, on the side of my heart; I have Mme.
de La Fayette at my right; Mme. Duplessis before me, daubing little
pictures; Mme. De Motteville a little further off, who dreams
profoundly; our uncle de Cessac, whom I fear because I do not know him
very well."

It is this life of charming informality; this society of lettered
tastes, of wit, of talent, of distinction, that she transfers to her
own salon. Its continuity is often broken by her long absences in the
country or in Provence, but her irresistible magnetism quickly draws the
world around her, on her return. In addition to her intimate friends
and to men of letters like Racine, Boileau, Benserade, one meets
representatives of the most distinguished of the old families of France.
Conde, Richelieu, Colberg, Louvois, and Sully are a few among the great
names, of which the list might be indefinitely extended. We have many
interesting glimpses of the Grande Mademoiselle, the "adorable" Duchesse
de Chaulnes, the Duc and Duchesse de Rohan, who were "Germans in the
art of savoir-vivre," the Abbess de Fontevrault, so celebrated for her
esprit and her virtue, and a host of others too numerous to mention. The
sculptured portals and time-stained walls of the Hotel de Carnavalet are
still alive with the memories of these brilliant reunions and the famous
people who shone there two hundred years ago.

Among those who exercised the most important influence upon the life
of Mme. de Sevigne was Corbinelli, the wise counselor, who, with a
soul untouched by the storms of adversity through which he had passed,
devoted his life to letters and the interests of his friends. No one had
a finer appreciation of her gifts and her character. Her compared her
letters to those of Cicero, but he always sought to temper her ardor,
and to turn her thoughts toward an elevated Christian philosophy.
"In him," said Mme. de Sevigne, "I defend one who does not cease to
celebrate the perfections and the existence of God; who never judges his
neighbor, who excuses him always; who is insensible to the pleasures and
delights of life, and entirely submissive to the will of Providence;
in fine, I sustain the faithful admirer of Sainte Therese, and of my
grandmother, Sainte Chantal." This gentle, learned, and disinterested
man, whose friendship deepened with years, was an unfailing resource. In
her troubles and perplexities she seeks his advice; in her intellectual
tastes she is sustained by his sympathy. She speaks often of the happy
days in Provence, when, together with her daughter, they translate
Tacitus, read Tasso, and get entangled in endless discussions upon
Descartes. Even Mme. de Grignan, who rarely likes her mother's friends,
in the end gives due consideration to this loyal confidant, though
she does not hesitate to ridicule the mysticism into which he finally
drifted.

After Mme. de La Fayette, the woman whose relations with Mme. de Sevigne
were the most intimate was Mme. de Coulanges, who merits here more than
a passing word. Her wit was proverbial, her popularity universal. The
Leaf, the Fly, the Sylph, the Goddess, her friend calls her in turn,
with many a light thrust at her volatile but loyal character. This
brilliant, spirituelle, caustic woman was the wife of a cousin of the
Marquis de Sevigne, who was as witty as herself and more inconsequent.
Both were amiable, both sparkled with bons mots and epigrams, but they
failed to entertain each other. The husband goes to Italy or Germany or
passes his time in various chateaux, where he is sure of a warm welcome
and good cheer. The wife goes to Versailles, visits her cousin Louvois,
the Duchesse de Richelieu, and Mme. de Maintenon, who loves her much; or
presides at home over a salon that is always well filled. "Ah, Madame,"
said M. de Barillon, "how much your house pleases me! I shall come here
very evening when I am tired of my family." "Monsieur," she replied, "I
expect you tomorrow." When she was ill and likely to die, her husband
had a sudden access of affection, and nursed her with great tenderness.
Mme. de Coulanges dying and her husband in grief, seemed somehow out
of the order of things. "A dead vivacity, a weeping gaiety, these are
prodigies," wrote Mme. de Sevigne. When the wife recovered, however,
they took their separate ways as before.

"Your letters are delicious," she wrote once to Mme. de Sevigne, "and
you are as delicious as your letters." Her own were as much sought in
her time, but she had no profound affection to consecrate them and no
children to collect them, so that only a few have been preserved. There
is a curious vein of philosophy in one she wrote to her husband, when
the pleasures of life began to fade. "As for myself, I care little for
the world; I find it no longer suited to my age; I have no engagements,
thank God, to retain me there. I have seen all there is to see. I have
only an old face to present to it, nothing new to show nor to discover
there. Ah! What avails it to recommence every day the visits, to trouble
one's self always about things that do not concern us? .... My dear sir,
we must think of something more solid." She disappears from the scene
shortly after the death of Mme. De Sevigne. Long years of silence and
seclusion, and another generation heard one day that she had lived and
that she was dead.

The friends of Mme. de Sevigne slip away one after another; La
Rochefoucauld, De Retz, Mme. de La Fayette are gone. "Alas!" she writes,
"how this death goes running about and striking on all sides." The
thought troubles her. "I am embarked in life without my consent," she
says; "I must go out of it--that overwhelms me. And how shall I go?
Whence: By what door? When will it be? In what disposition: How shall
I be with God? What have I to present to him? What can I hope?--Am I
worthy of paradise? Am I worthy of hell? What an alternative! What a
complication! I would like better to have died in the arms of my nurse."

The end came to her in the one spot where she would most have wished
it. She died while on a visit to her daughter in Provence. Strength
and resignation came with the moment, and she faced with calmness
and courage the final mystery. To the last she retained her wit, her
vivacity, and that eternal youth of the spirit which is one of the
rarest of God's gifts to man. "There are no more friends left to me,"
said Mme. de Coulanges; and later she wrote to Mme. de Grignan, "The
grief of seeing her no longer is always fresh to me. I miss too many
things at the Hotel de Carnavalet."

The curtain falls upon this little world which the magical pen of Mme.
de Sevigne has made us know so well. The familiar faces retreat into the
darkness, to be seen no more. But the picture lives, and the woman who
has outlined it so clearly, and colored it so vividly and so tenderly,
smiles upon us still, out of the shadows of the past, crowned with the
white radiance of immortal genius and immortal love.




CHAPTER VII. MADAME DE LA FAYETTE

_Her Friendship with Mme. de Sevigne--Her Education--Her Devotion to
the Princess Henrietta--Her Salon--La Rochefoucauld--Talent as
a Diplomatist--Comparison with Mme. de Maintenon Her Literary
Work--Sadness of her Last Days--Woman in Literature_

"Believe me, my dearest, you are the person in the world whom I have
most truly loved," wrote Mme. de La Fayette to Mme. de Sevigne a short
time before her death. This friendship of more than forty years, which
Mme. de Sevigne said had never suffered the least cloud, was a living
tribute to the mind and heart of both women. It may also be cited
for the benefit of the cynically disposed who declare that feminine
friendships are simply "pretty bows of ribbon" and nothing more. These
women were fundamentally unlike, but they supplemented each other. The
character of Mme. de La Fayette was of firmer and more serious texture.
She had greater precision of thought, more delicacy of sentiment, and
affections not less deep. But her temperament was less sunny, her
genius less impulsive, her wit less sparkling, and her manner less
demonstrative. "She has never been without that divine reason which was
her dominant trait," wrote her friend. No praise pleased her so much as
to be told that her judgment was superior to her intellect, and that she
loved truth in all things. "She would not have accorded the least favor
to any one, if she had not been convinced it was merited," said Segrais;
"this is why she was sometimes called hard, though she was really
tender." As an evidence of her candor, he thinks it worth while to
record that "she did not even conceal her age, but told freely in what
year and place she was born." But she combined to an eminent degree
sweetness with strength, sensibility with reason, and it was the
blending of such diverse qualities that gave so rare a flavor to her
character. In this, too, lies the secret of the vast capacity for
friendship which was one of her most salient points. It is through the
records which these friendships have left, through the literary work
that formed the solace of so many hours of sadness and suffering, and
through the letters of Mme. de Sevigne, that we are able to trace the
classic outlines of this fine and complex nature, so noble, so poetic,
so sweet, and yet so strong.

Mme. de La Fayette 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 her rare reputation for beauty and esprit, as well as learning,
she took her place early in this brilliant and distinguished society in
which she was to play so graceful and honored a part. She was sought and
admired not only by the men of letters who were so cordially welcomed
by the favorite niece of Richelieu, but by the gay world that habitually
assembled at the Petit Luxembourg. It was here that she perfected the
tone of natural elegance which always distinguished her and made her
conspicuous even at court, where she passed so many years of her life.

She was not far from twenty-one when she became the wife of the Comte de
La Fayette, of whom little is known save that he died early, leaving her
with two sons. He is the most shadowy of figures, and whether he made
her life happy or sad does not definitely appear, though there is a
vague impression that he left something to be desired in the way of
devotion. A certain interest attaches to him as the brother of the
beautiful Louise de La Fayette, maid of honor to Anne of Austria, who
fled from the compromising infatuation of Louis XIII, to hide her youth
and fascinations in the cloister, under the black robe and the cherished
name of Mere Angelique de Chaillot.

The young, brilliant, and gifted comtesse goes to the convent to visit
her gently austere sister-in-law, and meets there the Princess Henrietta
of England, than a child of eleven years. The attraction is mutual
and ripens into a deep and lasting friendship. When this graceful and
light-hearted girl becomes the Duchesse d'Orleans, and sister-in-law
of the king, she attaches her friend to her court and makes her the
confidante of her romantic experiences. "Do you not think," she said
to her one day, "that if all which has happened to me, and the things
relating to it, were told it would make a fine story? You write well;
write; I will furnish you good materials." The interesting memorial,
to which madame herself contributes many pages, is interrupted by
the mysterious death of the gay and charming woman who had found so
sympathetic and so faithful a chronicler. She breathed her last sigh in
the arms of this friend. "It is one of those sorrows for which one never
consoles one's self, and which leave a shadow over the rest of one's
life," wrote Mme. de La Fayette. She had no heart to finish the history,
and added only the few simple lines that record the touching incidents
which left upon her so melancholy and lasting an impression. She did not
care to remain longer at court, where she was constantly reminded of her
grief, and retired permanently from its gaieties; but in these years of
intimacy with one of its central figures, she had gained an insight
into its spirit and its intrigues, which was of inestimable value in the
memoirs and romances of her later years.

The natural place of Mme. de La Fayette was in a society of more serious
tone and more lettered tastes. In her youth she had been taken by her
mother to the Hotel de Rambouillet, and she always retained much of its
spirit, without any of its affectations. We find her sometimes at
the Samedis, and she belonged to the exclusive coterie of the Grande
Mademoiselle, at the Luxembourg, where her facile pen was in demand for
the portraits so much in vogue. She was also a frequent visitor in the
literary salon of Mme. de Sable, at Port Royal. It was here that her
friendship with La Rochefoucauld glided imperceptibly into the intimacy
which became so important a feature in her life. This intimacy was
naturally a matter of some speculation, but the world made up its
mind of its perfectly irreproachable character. "It appears to be only
friendship," writes Mme. de Scudery to Bussy-Rabutin; "in short the fear
of God on both sides, and perhaps policy, have cut the wings of love.
She is his favorite and his first friend." "I do not believe he has
ever been what one calls in love," writes Mme. de Sevigne. But this
friendship was a veritable romance, without any of the storms or
vexations or jealousies of a passionate love. "You may imagine the
sweetness and charm of an intercourse full of all the friendship and
confidence possible between two people whose merit is not ordinary,"
she says again; "add to this the circumstance of their bad health, which
rendered them almost necessary to each other, and gave them the
leisure not to be found in other relations, to enjoy each other's
good qualities. It seems to me that at court people have no time for
affection; the whirlpool which is so stormy for others was peaceful
for them, and left ample time for the pleasures of a friendship so
delicious. I do not believe that any passion can surpass the strength of
such a tie."

In the earlier stages of this intimacy, Mme. de La Fayette was a little
sensitive as to how the world might regard it, as may be seen in a note
to Mme. de Sable, in which she asks her to explain it to the young Comte
de Saint-Paul, a son of Mme. de Longueville.

"I beg of you to speak of the matter in such a way as to put out of
his head the idea that it is anything serious," she writes. "I am not
sufficiently sure what you think of it yourself to feel certain that you
will say the right thing, and it may be necessary to begin by convincing
my embassador. However, I must trust to your tact, which is superior to
ordinary rules. Only convince him. I dislike mortally that people of his
age should imagine that I have affairs of gallantry. It seems to
them that every one older than themselves is a hundred, and they are
astonished that such should be regarded of any account. Besides, he
would believe these things of M. de La Rochefoucauld more readily than
of any one else. In fine, I do not want him to think anything about it
except that the gentleman is one of my friends."

The picture we have of La Rochefoucauld from the pen of Mme. de Sevigne
has small resemblance to the ideal that one forms of the cynical author
of the Maxims. He had come out of the storms of the Fronde a sad and
disappointed man. The fires of his nature seem to have burned out with
the passions of his youth, if they had ever burned with great intensity.
"I have seen love nowhere except in romances," he says, and even his
devotion to Mme. de Longueville savors more of the ambitious courtier
than of the lover. His nature was one that recoiled from all violent
commotions of the soul. The cold philosophy of the Maxims marked perhaps
the reaction of his intellect against the disenchanting experiences of
his life. In the tranquil atmosphere of Mme. de Sable he found a certain
mental equilibrium; but his character was finally tempered and softened
by the gentle influence of Mme. de La Fayette, whose exquisite poise and
delicacy were singularly in harmony with a nature that liked nothing in
exaggeration. "I have seen him weep with a tenderness that made me adore
him," writes Mme. de Sevigne, after the death of his mother. "The heart
or M. de La Rochefoucauld for his family is a thing incomparable." When
the news came that his favorite grandson had been killed in battle, she
says again: "I have seen his heart laid bare in this cruel misfortune;
he ranks first among all I have ever known for courage, fortitude,
tenderness, and reason; I count for nothing his esprit and his charm."
In all the confidences of the two women, La Rochefoucauld makes a third.
He seems always to be looking over the shoulder of Mme. de La Fayette
while she writes to the one who "satisfies his idea of friendship in all
its circumstances and dependences"; adding usually a message, a line
or a pretty compliment to Mme. de Grignan that is more amiable than
sincere, because he knows it will gladden the heart of her adoring
mother.

The side of Mme. de La Fayette which has the most fascination for us
is this intimate life of which Mme. de Sevigne gives such charming
glimpses. For a moment it was her ambition to establish a popular
salon, a role for which she had every requisite of position, talent, and
influence. "She presumed very much upon her esprit," says Gourville,
who did not like her, "and proposed to fill the place of the Marquise
de Sable, to whom all the young people were in the habit of paying great
deference, because, after she had fashioned them a little, it was a
passport for entering the world; but this plan did not succeed, as Mme.
de La Fayette was not willing to give her time to a thing so futile."
One can readily understand that it would not have suited her tastes or
her temperament. Besides, her health was too delicate, and her moods
were too variable. "You know how she is weary sometimes of the same
thing," wrote Mme. de Sevigne. But she had her coterie, which was
brilliant in quality if not in numbers. The fine house with its pretty
garden, which may be seen today opposite the Petit Luxembourg, was a
favorite meeting place for a distinguished circle. The central figure
was La Rochefoucauld. Every day he came in and seated himself in the
fauteuil reserved for him. One is reminded of the little salon in the
Abbaye-aux-Bois, where more than a century later Chateaubriand found
the pleasure and the consolation of his last days in the society of Mme.
Recamier. They talk, they write, they criticize each other, they receive
their friends. The Cardinal de Retz comes in, and they recall the fatal
souvenirs of the Fronde. Perhaps he thinks of the time when he found the
young Mlle. De LaVergne pretty and amiable, and she did not smile upon
him. The Prince de Conde is there sometimes, and honors her with his
confidence, which Mme. de Sevigne thinks very flattering, as he does
not often pay such consideration to women. Segrais has transferred his
allegiance from the Grande Mademoiselle to Mme. de La Fayette, and is
her literary counselor as well as a constant visitor. La Fontaine,
"so well known by his fables and tales, and sometimes so heavy in
conversation," may be found there. Mme. de Sevigne comes almost every
day with her sunny face and her witty story. "The Mist" she calls
Mme. de La Fayette, who is so often ill and sad. She might have called
herself The Sunbeam, though she, too, has her hours when she can only
dine tete-a-tete with her friend, because she is "so gloomy that
she cannot support four people together." Mme. de Coulanges adds her
graceful, vivacious, and sparkling presence. Mme. Scarron, before her
days of grandeur, is frequently of the company, and has lost none of the
charm which made the salon of her poet-husband so attractive during his
later years. "She has an amiable and marvelously just mind," says Mme.
de Sevigne... "It is pleasant to hear her talk. These conversations
often lead us very far, from morality to morality, sometimes Christian,
sometimes political." This circle was not limited however to a few
friends, and included from time to time the learning, the elegance and
the aristocracy of Paris.

But Mme. de La Fayette herself is the magnet that quietly draws together
this fascinating world. In her youth she had much life and vivacity,
perhaps a spice of discreet coquetry, but at this period she was
serious, and her fresh beauty had given place to the assured and
captivating grace of maturity. She had a face that might have been
severe in its strength but for the sensibility expressed in the slight
droop of the head to one side, the tender curve of the full lips, and
the variable light of the dark, thoughtful eyes. In her last years, when
her stately figure had grown attenuated, and her face was pallid
with long suffering, the underlying force of her character was more
distinctly defined in the clear and noble outlines of her features. Her
nature was full of subtle shades. Over her reserved strength, her calm
judgment, her wise penetration played the delicate light of a lively
imagination, the shifting tints of a tender sensibility. Her sympathy
found ready expression in tears, and she could not even bear the
emotion of saying good-by to Mme. de Sevigne when she was going away to
Provence. But her accents were always tempered, and her manners had the
gracious and tranquil ease of a woman superior to circumstances. Her
extreme frankness lent her at times a certain sharpness, and she deals
many light blows at the small vanities and affectations that come under
her notice. "Mon Dieu," said the frivolous Mme. de Marans to her one
day, "I must have my hair cut." "Mon Dieu," replied Mme. de La Fayette
simply, "do not have it done; that is becoming only to young persons."
Gourville said she was imperious and over-bearing, scolding those she
loved best, as well as those she did not love. But this valet-de-chambre
of La Rochefoucauld, who amassed a fortune and became a man of some
note, was jealous of her influence over his former maste

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