SEVIGNÉ, MARIE DE RABUTIN CHANTAL, MARQUISE
DE, was born in 1627. When only a year old she lost her
father, who was killed in the descent of the English on the
isle of Rhé, where he commanded a company of volunteers.
In 1644 she married the Marquis of Sevigné, who was slain
in a duel by the Chevalier d'Albret, in 1651. She had by
him a son and a daughter, to the education of whom she
afterwards religiously devoted herself. Her daughter was
married in 1669 to the Count de Grignan, who conducted
her to Provence. Madame de Sevigné consoled herself by
writing frequent letters to her daughter, but she fell at last
the victim to her maternal tenderness. In one of her visits
to Grignan, she fatigued herself so much during the sick-
ness of her daughter, that she was seized with a fever,
which carried her off on the 14th of January 1696. We
have two portraits of Madame de Sevigné; the one by the
Comte de Bussi, and the other by Madame de la Fayette.
Bussi describes her as a lively gay coquette, a lover of flat-
tery, fond of titles, honour, and distinction; M. de la Fay-
ette, as a woman of wit and good sense, as possessed of a
noble spirit, formed for dispensing benefits, incapable of
debasing herself by avarice, and blessed with a generous,
obliging, and faithful heart. Both these portraits are in
some measure just.
Madame de Sevigné was acquainted with all the wits of
her age. It is said that she decided the famous dispute
between Perrault and Boileau concerning the preference
of the ancients to the moderns. She left behind her a most
valuable collection of letters, a good edition of which is
that of 1775, in eight volumes 12mo. "These letters,"
says Voltaire, "are filled with anecdotes, written with free-
dom, and in a natural and animated style; are an excellent
criticism on studied letters of wit, and still more on those
fictitious letters which aim at the epistolary style, by a re-
cital of false sentiments and feigned adventures to an im-
aginary correspondent." It were to be wished that a proper
selection had been made of these letters. They may be
looked on as a relation of the manners, the tone, the genius,
the fashions, and the etiquette, of the court of Louis XIV.
They also contain many curious anecdotes nowhere else to
be found. The most complete edition of these epistles is
that of De Montmerqué, 13 vols., 1818, which contains
many letters never before published. J. Ad. Aubenas
has written the Histoire de Madame de Sevigné de sa
famille et de ses amis, Paris, 1842; and Alphonse de
Lamartine has written an elaborate account of her in his
Mémoires of Celebrated Characters, Vol. III., 1856. A
volume of Sevigniana was published at Paris in 1756.