The Marquise de Sévigné: from Paris to Grignan

She was fortunate enough to be a widow, and to be one while still young: when her fickle husband died from the after-effects of a duel in 1651, the Marquise de Sévigné was only twenty-five. If she was affected, no doubt, by the death of her husband, she showed herself lucid about the shortcomings of their marriage — “Monsieur de Sévigné esteems me and does not love me; I, for my part, love him and do not esteem him.” — and about the advantages of widowhood for a woman of her rank. Freed from all male guardianship, this mother of two children — Françoise-Marguerite and Charles — chose not to remarry.

Before she was a widow, she was an orphan. Born in 1626, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal lost her parents at the age of six. Her childhood was happy nonetheless, within her maternal family, the Coulanges, and in the heart of the Marais, place Royale (today’s place des Vosges). It was the new fashionable district; she herself later settled there, in the hôtel Carnavalet. She received a refined education under conditions that were relatively rare for a young girl of the nobility, since she escaped the convent. She learned Italian, Spanish and Latin, read Tasso, Ariosto, Cervantes and Virgil, but also contemporary authors, La Fontaine or Corneille, whom she ranked above Racine. Her paternal grandmother, Jeanne de Chantal, who founded the Order of the Visitation with François de Sales and was canonized in 1767, also saw to it that her granddaughter learned to think.
The — relative — independence of this woman, her refined education, the cultivated society she frequented, the crucible of a modern culture, no doubt enabled her to develop the literary qualities that made her letters famous. The most numerous were those she addressed to her daughter, who had gone to live in the Drôme in 1671, when her husband, the Comte de Grignan, was appointed lieutenant general of Provence. This correspondence, which has passed into posterity, left the image of a loving, even tearful mother, but the marquise also had as correspondents brilliant minds such as the poet Jean Chapelain or the writer Gilles Ménage, and a few of the king’s ministers, among them Nicolas Fouquet and the Marquis de Pomponne. With her adored cousin, the caustic and flamboyant Bussy-Rabutin, she developed the art of “rabutinage,” a complicity in wit and laughter. The marquise’s epistolary talent, which had a gift for the apt phrase and knew how to manage its effects, was recognized in her lifetime, and it sometimes happened that her letters, witty and piquant, were read aloud in the salons.

To devote an exhibition to a woman famous for her correspondence may seem perilous all the same. What is there to show, apart from a few likenesses (ill. 1) and hundreds of letters displayed in…