d of her own epistolary writing.

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was her maiden name. She was born a baroness.
She was married, young, a marchioness. First early left an orphan, she
was afterward early left a widow,--not too early, however, to have
become the mother of two children, a son and a daughter. The daughter
grew to be the life-long idol of the widowed mother's heart. The letters
she wrote to this daughter, married, and living remote from her, compose
the greater part of that voluminous epistolary production by which
Madame de Sevigne became, without her ever aiming at such a result, or
probably ever thinking of it, one of the classics of the French
language.

Madame de Sevigne was wealthy as orphan heiress, and she should have
been wealthy as widow. But her husband was profligate, and he wasted her
substance. She turned out to be a thoroughly capable woman of affairs
who managed her property well. During her long and stainless
widowhood--her husband fell in a shameful duel when she was but
twenty-five years old, and she lived to be seventy--she divided her time
between her estate, The Rocks, in Brittany, and her residence in Paris.
This period was all embraced within the protracted reign of Louis XIV.,
perhaps, upon the whole, the most memorable age in the history of
France.

Beautiful, and, if not brilliantly beautiful, at least brilliantly
witty, Madame de Sevigne was virtuous--in that chief sense of feminine
virtue--amid an almost universal empire of profligacy around her. Her
social advantages were unsurpassed, and her social success was equal to
her advantages. She had the woman courtier's supreme triumph in being
once led out to dance by the king--her own junior by a dozen years--no
vulgar king, remember, but the "great" Louis XIV. Her cynical cousin,
himself a writer of power, who had been repulsed in dishonorable
proffers of love by the young marchioness during the lifetime of her
husband,--we mean Count Bussy,--says, in a scurrilous work of his, that
Madame de Sevigne remarked, on returning to her seat after her
dancing-bout with the king, that Louis possessed great qualities, and
would certainly obscure the lustre of all his predecessors. "I could not
help laughing in her face," the ungallant cousin declared, "seeing what
had produced this panegyric." Probably, indeed, the young woman was
pleased. But, whatever may have been her faults or her follies, nothing
can rob Madame de Sevigne of the glory that