the days of Louis XIII. than to the age of his successor, when language
grew more exact for the intelligence, but lost much of its passion
and untamed energy.

The epistolary art, in which the art itself is nature, may be said
to have reached perfection, with scarcely an historical development,
in the letters of MME. DE SEVIGNE. The letters of Balzac are rhetorical
exercises; those of Voiture are often, to use a word of Shakespeare,
"heavy lightness, serious vanity." Mme. de Sevigne entered into the
gains of a cultivated society, in which graceful converse had become
a necessity of existence. She wrote delightfully, because she
conveyed herself into her letters, and because she conversed freely
and naturally by means of her pen. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, born
in 1626, deprived of both parents in her earliest years, was carefully
trained in literary studies--Latin, Italian, French--under the
superintendence of her uncle, "le bien bon," the Abbe de Coulanges.
Among her teachers were the scholar Menage and the poet Chapelain.
Married at eighteen to an unworthy husband, the Marquis Henri de
Sevigne, she was left at twenty-five a widow with two children, the
daughter whom she loved with excess of devotion, and a son, who
received from his mother a calmer affection. She saw the life of the
court, she was acquainted with eminent writers, she frequented the
Hotel de Rambouillet (retaining from it a touch of preciosity, "one
superfluous ribbon," says Nisard, "in a simple and elegant toilet"),
she knew and loved the country and its rural joys, she read with
excellent judgment and eager delight the great books of past and
present times.

When her daughter, "the prettiest girl in France," was married in
1669 to M. de Grignan, soon to be Lieutenant-General of Provence,
Mme. de Sevigne, desiring to be constantly one with her, at least
in thought, transferred into letters her whole life from day to day,
together with much of the social life of the time during a period
of nearly thirty years. She allowed her pen to trot, throwing the
reins, as she says, upon its neck; but if her letters are
improvisations, they are improvisations regulated by an exquisite
artistic instinct. Her imagination is alert in discovering,
combining, and presenting the happiest meanings of reality. She is
gay, witty, ironical, malicious, and all this without a trace of
malignity; amiable rather than passionate, except in the ardour of
her maternal devotion