Queen of Letters

LETTERS FROM MADAME LA MARQUISE DE Sevigne (389 pp.)--Selecfed and translated by Violet Hammersley--Harcourt, Brace ($6.75).

Louis XIV ruled an empire on which the sun quickly set, but its literary lights --Corneille, Racine, Pascal, La Fontaine--still glow. Among them was Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sevigne, whom generations of critics have crowned "the queen of letter writers." In this selection of 272 out of many hundreds of De Sevigne letters, the diadem seems to have its fair share of paste jewels, but it is worn with a regal flourish and idiosyncratic authority.

In a brief biographical introduction, British Essayist Violet Hammersley outlines the life that drove Madame de Sevigne to ink. Widowed at 25 when her chronically unfaithful husband was killed in a duel over his latest mistress,* Madame de Sevigne succumbed to the grand passion of possessive mother love for her only daughter. Cold, proud and wildly extravagant, the daughter was a great beauty and Madame de Sevigne married her off to a rich, twice-widowed count. But when her daughter left her side, Madame de Sevigne began carrying a literary torch. Mamma is soon berating the young countess for her recurrent miscarriages and successful pregnancies. The count, of course, is even more blameworthy. "You are reported to have said [regarding] my daughter's confinements . . . that the oftener she does it the better. Dear God! She never does anything else . . . If this poor machine is never allowed a pause, you will destroy her utterly."

Like Oscar Wilde's strong-minded dowager, Lady Bracknell, Madame de Sevigne held that "health is the primary duty of life." She was her daughter's full-time amateur diagnostician, strongly opposed to bloodletting, but an advocate of "viper soup," i.e., snake consomme. Often Madame de Sevigne sounds rather like a faded copy of "Versailles Confidential." ("At one fell stroke the other day, the Queen lost 20,000 crowns and missed hearing Mass.") Letter-Writer De Sevigne is more fun when she is consciously making her own mots, e.g., on a gourmandizing bishop: "M. de Rennes marked the pages of his breviary with slices of ham."

Madame calmly notes one culprit's end: "She was burned at the stake yesterday, not Wednesday, as I had told you . . ." The woman who had been burned as a witch, La Voisin by name, was no innocent victim but a notorious poisoner and promoter of Black Masses. She symbolized the strange, diabolic resistance movement that flourished beneath the surface of official society, just as Madame de Sevigne symbolized the outer serenity and almost Japanese exactitude of social forms. There is no evidence that her 17th century mind understood that underground passion for evil any more than the passion for sainthood. She could only sigh with stoic disenchantment: "What hope can there be. for one who is neither worthy of heaven nor of hell?" This line sums up perfectly a kind of moral neutralism that did not end with Madame de Sevigne.

She embodies the tragic flaw of her class and her time--the triumph of manner over matter. The dry, brittle, world-weary elite chronicled in Madame de Sevigne's letters had lopped itself off from the body of France long before the guillotine of the Revolution did it. Madame de Sevigne died in 1696. Less than a century later, a revolutionary mob broke into her tomb and savagely strewed about her bones.

* One of his earlier mistresses, famed Courtesan Ninon de Lenclos, became in time the mistress of Madame de Sevigne's son and, according to some reports, of her grandson. On the tomb of this durable charmer (she died at 85) were carved the words: ". . . She was renowned for her chastity during the last years of her life."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.