Lettres

Picture a forty-five-year-old woman, lively, cheerful, her heart in turmoil, sitting in her Marais townhouse one February evening in 1671, taking up her pen because her daughter has just left for Provence, a departure that has torn her soul apart. The carriage has turned the corner of the street, the horses have vanished, and there sits Madame de Sévigné, alone with her ink, her tears, and this ravenous hunger to speak to the one who is no longer there. From this very first evening, everything is set in motion: absence will be the driving force of it all, the letter will be the sole remedy, and this remedy will never cure her.

Yet this correspondence does not begin in 1671. Long before Françoise-Marguerite married the Comte de Grignan and went to live two hundred leagues from her mother, Madame de Sévigné was already writing—to her cousin Bussy-Rabutin, that brilliant, insufferable soldier who made her laugh and whom she scolded like a brother; to Pomponne, the faithful exiled friend, to whom she recounted the trial of Fouquet day by day with a gazetteer's fever and a partisan's heart; to Ménage, the lovestruck wit whom she kept at bay with faultless grace; to Coulanges, the singing cousin, to whom she tossed her most breathtaking news. For this woman needs to recount as others need to breathe, and every event that comes within her reach—a duel, a wedding, a sermon, a comet, a dish of green peas—instantly finds its form in a sentence that races, bounds, and stops on a dime.

The Fouquet trial is her first great affair. She is wholly consumed by it. She counts the judges' votes on her fingers, she watches for the couriers, she trembles, she hopes, she rages against Pussort who speaks for four hours with an executioner's fury, she admires d'Ormesson who rules for banishment with an eloquence that moves her to tears. She learns that Berrier has gone mad, that he babbles of gallows and wheels, and she sees in this a divine punishment so fitting that she shudders. She notes that a comet has appeared in the Parisian sky and that she has seen it with her own eyes at three in the morning. When the verdict finally falls—banishment, not death—she writes to Pomponne a note that says it all: she is so glad she is beside herself. Then the king commutes the sentence to life imprisonment; Fouquet is taken to Pignerol under the guard of d'Artagnan and fifty musketeers; he is stripped of his servants Pecquet and Lavalée, and her joy twists into cold indignation. She describes the scene where Fouquet, catching sight of d'Ormesson through the window of d'Artagnan's room, greets him with an open, deeply grateful face, and d'Ormesson walks away with a heavy heart.

Then comes the great society coup de théâtre, the letter to Coulanges of December 15, 1670, that bravura piece where she announces the marriage of Mademoiselle to Lauzun through a cascade of superlative adjectives—the most astonishing, most surprising, most marvelous thing—and a guessing game that keeps the reader in suspense like a novel. Four days later, everything collapses: the king forbids the marriage, Mademoiselle bursts into tears, Lauzun receives the order with a deeply respectful despair, and Madame de Sévigné, who had sensed the catastrophe from the very first day, goes to console the princess at her bedside, where she is bathed in her tears.

But all this is merely the prelude. The true music, the music that will never cease, begins with the departure of Madame de Grignan. From then on, two to three times a week, for twenty-five years, the mother writes to the daughter, and in these letters there is everything: news of the Dutch War and the death of the Duc de Longueville at the crossing of the Rhine, recounted with a tragic sweep in which one hears the cries of the Duchess, his mother, learning the news by degrees, her mind not daring to go any further; the magnificent funeral rites where Le Brun designed the mausoleum and Lully brought the entire congregation to tears with his Miserere; the quarrels over precedence in Provence, the money troubles, the excessive spending of the Grignans, the rutted roads of Brittany and the avenues of Livry where she walks alone thinking of her daughter; the sermons of Bourdaloue and the plays of Corneille, which she adores, and those of Racine, which she does not love enough and of which she wrongly predicts people will tire as they will of coffee; the new green peas the whole court is scrambling for; the death of Vatel, who fell on his sword because the fish did not arrive; the executions, the poisoners, the forced conversions, the dragonnades; the chocolate drunk in excess that sets one afire; the granddaughter she watches play for hours on end, of whom she says she does not want this to die.

Through all of this, the thread that never breaks is her love for her daughter. A love so violent, so excessive, so constantly stated and restated in a thousand different forms that it becomes almost frightening. She regrets the time she spends away from her and hastens what remains of it to be reunited, as if she had much time to lose. She turns her spyglass around to distance the tiresome crowds and think only of her. She knows not where to flee from her daughter, finding her so utterly everywhere in her thoughts. When the letters from Provence arrive, the whole house rejoices; when they are delayed, there is anguish. And their reunions, when they take place—for Madame de Sévigné does make the journey to Provence, spending months on end at Grignan—are so sweet it seems to her she has still not come soon enough, nor from far enough away.

Yet this devouring tenderness precludes nothing of her cheerfulness, her mischief, her ruthless gaze upon the world. She sketches Madame de Brissac playing the invalid on her bed, beautiful and coiffed to outdo them all, making such cunning use of her ailments, her eyes, her arms trailing on the quilt, that the entire scene seems staged for an audience of suitors. She tells of the Archbishop of Reims, whose carriage runs over a man and his horse, and whose footmen shout at the poor wretch that he ought to be given a hundred lashes. She records the death of Louvois in three sentences with the sweeping power of Bossuet: this mighty minister whose 'I' took up so much space, who still wanted a moment to humiliate a duke, to crush a prince, and who was denied that moment. She shifts from the sublime to the trivial, from mourning to bursts of laughter, from a meditation on death to a jam recipe, all within the sweep of a single letter, using transitions that are not transitions at all but leaps of the mind, bounds of the heart.

She grows old, the letters continue. Time passes, and she watches it pass with a lucidity that chills her yet does not stop her from laughing. She sees herself dragged against her will to that fatal point where old age must be endured, and she would fain manage, at the very least, to go no further down this path of infirmities and disfigurements. But she hears a voice saying she must walk on in spite of herself, or else die, and that nature recoils at the one as much as the other. She watches a clock and takes pleasure in the thought that the hand turns without being seen, and that all things come to an end. She eventually leaves Paris for good to settle with her daughter at the Château de Grignan, in that Provence whose remoteness she had cursed for so long. There she dies on April 17, 1696, at the age of seventy, at the end of her letters, at the end of her tenderness, in the bedchamber of that very daughter she had never ceased seeking through paper, ink, and the roads of France.