e did
what Montaigne did a century before, when, we may almost assert, he
had to create the French language. Her most striking expressions are
her own--newly coined, not taken from the vocabulary in usage. Her
style cannot be duplicated, and for this reason she has few imitators.
Her letters show that they were improvised--her pen doing, alone, the
work over which she seemed to have no control when communicating with
her daughter; to the latter she said: "I write prose with a facility
that will kill you."

Mme. de Sevigne was possibly not a beautiful woman, but she was a
charming one; broad in the scope of her affections, she found the
making of friends no difficult task. M. Vallery-Radot leaves the
following picture of her: "A blonde, with exuberant health, a
transparent complexion, blue eyes, so frank, so limpid, a nose
somewhat square, a mouth ready to smile, shoulders that seem to lend
splendor to her pearl necklace. Her gayety and goodness are so in
evidence that there is about her a kind of atmosphere of good humor."

M. du Bled most admirably sums up her character and writings in the
following: "She is the person who most resembles her writings--that
is, those that are found; for alas! many (the most confidential, the
most interesting, I think) are lost forever: in them she is reflected
as she reflects French society in them. Endowed--morally and
physically--with a robust health, she is expansive, loyal, confiding,
impressionable, loving gayety in full abundance as much as she does
the smile of the refined, as eager for the prattle of the court as
for solid reading, smitten with nobiliary pride, a captive of the
prejudices, superstitions and tastes of her caste (or of even her
coterie), with her pen hardly tender for her neighbor--her daughter
and intimates excepted. A manager and a woman of imagination, a
Frondist at the bottom of her soul, and somewhat of a Jansenist--not
enough, however, not to cry out that Louis XIV. will obscure the glory
of his predecessors because he had just danced with her--faithful to
her friends (Retz, Fouquet, Pomponne) in disgrace and detesting their
persecutors, seeking the favor of court for her children. In the
salons, she is celebrated for her _esprit_--and this at an age when
one seldom thinks about reputation, when one is like the princess who
replied to a question on the state of her soul, 'At twenty one has
no soul;' and she possesses the qualities that are so essential to