A mother's love
Peter Quennell
Madame de Sevigne: Selected Letters Translated and introduced by Leonard Tancock (Penguin £2.95) Marie de Rabutin Chantal, born in 1626, married in 1644 to a Breton country gentleman Henri de Sevigne, was the victim almost all her adult life of an overwhelming passion — not for her hus- band, a spendthrift gallant, killed in a duel about another woman after seven years' wedlock; not for any lover of her own, since her record was conspicuously blameless; nor, indeed, for her only son Charles, of whom she was certainly fond, though she regarded him, rightly no doubt, as an amiable nincompoop; but for her daughter Francoise Marguerite, who, once she had wedded the middle-aged M. de Grignan and moved away to a distant,Pro- vencal château, became, the focus of her whole existence. Madame de Sevigne was an extremely clever woman, shrewd, humorous and level-headed. In her relationship with her daughter alone did she abandon com- monsense and stray into the realms of high romantic feeling. Proust's M. de Charlus, himself so often the prey of irrational love, found Madame de Sevigne's case par- ticularly understandable. What she had felt for Madame de Grignan, he observes in A l'ombre des Jeunes Filles en fleurs, bore a far closer resemblance to the passions that Racine describes than did her son's banal attachment to his various mistresses; 'les demarcations trop etroites que nous tracons autour de !'amour viennent seulement de noire grande ignorance de la vie': a truth not fully understood by historians less sym- pathetic than Proust.
The sharp contrast between Madame de Sevigne's cult of her pretty, stupid daughter and her realistic attitude towards the world at large still puzzles, and occasionally of- fends, her 20th-century biographers. Are not the endearments she lavishes on Madame de Grignan perhaps a little too sensuous? When she writes ` "Do you think that I don't... kiss your beautiful cheeks and your beautiful breast?" we are embar- rassed', complains a modern French critic. It is true of course that during the 17th and 18th centuries, warm affection and downright passion were apt to speak the same language; but there is no doubt that Madame de Sevigne's cult took an alarm- ingly obsessive turn.
Yet, despite her strange emotional ex- cesses, she preserved her sense of style, and sufficient literary balance to produce, in the form of more than 1,300 letters, one of the masterpieces of French prose. Her favourite correspondent was inevitably Madame de Grignan; but the circle she addressed was wide and embraced some much more in- teresting characters. Thanks to an excellent education, she had a well-equipped mind, and had studied and enjoyed the works of Montaigne and Rabelais and, among the moderns, those of Corneille, Moliere, Pascal and La Fontaine. The brilliantly original novelist Madame de La Fayette and her dear companion, the great aphorist La Rochefoucauld, were both of them beloved friends.
Meanwhile, as a member of fashionable society, she was respected and admired at Court. She was even considered a beauty, though her eyes, which were plainly rather small, are said to have been of different col- ours; and, as her portrait by Nanteuil reveals, she had a broad and plumpish face. It was her personal charm and natural ease of manner that most attracted her contem- poraries — for example, Saint-Simon, seldom a kindly historian, who pays her an uncriticr tly generous tribute. Besides prais- ing her grace and affability and the sweetness of her disposition, he notes that she was versed in all kinds of subjects yet shunned the least parade of learning. His criticism is reserved for Madame de Grignan; a stilted, affected, pretentious young woman, she did little to deserve her mother's love.
When Madame de Sevigne died at the Grignans' country house in April 1696, ac- cording to Saint-Simon's obituary paragraph she was already famous through her letters, but not until 1725 was a preliminary text published. Then her far- reaching celebrity began; and today her masterpiece has acquired an additional renown from its link with that of Marcel Proust. A la Recherche du Temps perdu contains over 30 mentions of Madame de Sevigne, reinforced by a series of quota- tions, most of them (the editors of the Pleiade volumes point out) curiously mis- transcribed. Proust was as keenly devoted to his mother and maternal grandmother as the letter-writer to her favourite child; and each lady had a taste for her cor- respondence, and a regard for her domestic virtues, that the novelist inherited.
A specialist in the study of obsessive human passions — Swann's infatuation with Odette, the Narrator's long pursuit of Albertine — like M. de Charlus, he quickly understood and accepted Madame de Sevigne's emotional weaknesses, and at the same time appreciated the strange qualities of her literary imagination. She adored Nature in a period when it was frequently neglected, and, describing a difficult winter-journey, first evoked the Romantic idea of a grandly 'horrid' scene: Nous ne respirons que de la neige; nos montagnes sont charmantes dans leur exces d'horreur; je souhaite tous les jours un peintre pour bien representer Petendue de toutes ces epouvantables beautes.
Elsewhere, in a passage Proust especially admired, she writes of visiting her moon-lit garden; it disclosed `mille coquecrigues' she says, a thousand phantasmal shapes, monks black and white, grey and white nuns, sheets of linen tossed around at random, men shrouded and upright against the boles of the trees. He was fascinated, Proust com- ments, by what he would afterwards call 'le cote Dostoievski' of Madame de Sevigne's letters. Did she not depict landscapes as the Russian novelist portrayed his fantastic men and women?
It would be wrong to suggest, however, that she was extravagantly self-centred and primarily concerned with her own sensa- tions and emotions. Madame de Sevigne was always an acute observer of the age through which she lived. She lights up, in passing, the background of a whole period and its many public dramas — the disgrace and imprisonment of her friend Fouquet, the once all-powerful Finance Minister; the
The Spectator 30 October 1982 rise and fall of the King's mistresses; the el; fects of the Revocation of the Edict 01, Nantes and the subsequent persecution 01 the Protestant community, with wh(Se plight, alas, she couldn't sympathise. Troublesome people, those heretics, she thought, whom the King did well to banish. Then, having chronicled some tragic Ina. jor event, she gives Madame de Grignan a delightfully vivid account of a comic ono!! misadventure. Her brother Charles is stla making a fool of himself, she informs tha ,,t stiff and priggish woman. Having hee,,'' dismissed by the veteran courtesan Nin°' de Lenclos, he had now fixed his attentions on Marie Champmesle, a distinguished young Racinean actress; but once an opPcIr. tunity of entering her bed occurred `oserai-je le dire?' — he discovered that' temporarily at least, he was quite incapable of seizing it and had rushed across Paris at breakneck speed to tell his mother the pathetic story. de In the complete version, Madame ., Sevigne's Letters fill three extremelY solid tomes; and Mr Leonard Tancock has CO"'t,'s pressed his material, together with nota and a sound straightforward preface, i111_e; mere 320 pages. His selection is sensibl none of the letters he prints has been „ abridged — evidently a great advantag.'n' But why did the publishers of Peng°19 Classics not provide us with a proper index' i This strikes me as the only serious defect of an otherwise useful and engaging book.
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