See Roman History, § 5.

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 de 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 conspired 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 sickness 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 flattery, fond of titles, honour, and distinction; M. de la Fayette, 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 freedom, 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 recital of false sentiments and feigned adventures to an imaginary 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 Memoirs of Celebrated Characters, Vol. III., 1856. A volume of Sevigniana was published at Paris in 1756.