If you ever want a glimpse into 17th century aristocratic France, reading this biography and excerpts of Madame de Sévigné’s many letters will certainly give you that. She was a prolific letter writer, and unbeknownst to her, many of her correspondences were saved, giving us a fantastic insight into the pre-revolution period of Louis XIV, albeit voyeuristically.

She’s removed from daily court life but Madame de Sévigné is high enough in French society to know the King and charm the royal court, and through her we see the corruption of absolute monarchies, even though she obsequiously writes in his favor (likely because she knew letters could be opened and read by government officials at any time). Louis XIV goes through mistresses as he wishes, with noblemen often throwing their daughters, sisters, or wives his way in the hope that they might become the new ‘Favorite’ (calling to mind the Mel Brooks characterization of Louix XVI and the line ‘It’s good to be the king’). He wastes enormous amounts of money on Versailles, and pushes to get it done so quickly that there is a “prodigious mortality rate among the workmen – cartloads of corpses carried off nightly from Versailles, as from the Charity Hospitals.” He imprisons powerful men for appearing to threaten his authority or in some other way falling out of favor (e.g. in the case of Nicolas Fouquet for building a splendid palace of his own at Vaux-le-Vicomte). He starts wars on his neighbors and sometimes adopts a scorched-earth policy, such as when he burns over 20 substantial towns like Heidelberg in 1689, which Madame de Sévigné’s grandson was a part of. He keeps the poor in misery by making them shoulder the main burden in his system of taxation, and weakens the nobility by either calling them to Paris, so that they are much less effective in running and profiting from their estates in the provinces, or forcing them into government positions in the provinces where they have to foot the bill for local armies and entertaining. It’s crystal clear to us why the French revolution 100 years later would come.

One of the interesting anecdotes Madame de Sévigné tells us about is François Vatel, an accomplished maître d'hôtel who committed suicide by running himself through with his sword propped up against a door, succeeding only on the third try, and all because he felt disgraced that seafood shipments for an important banquet were late (with the irony being that they came that same day). Another fascinating passage is about her visit to Versailles, where aside from the lavish trappings (“the furnishings are divine, utter magnificence everywhere”), we hear about the high stakes gambling, and things like going out on the canal in gondolas, accompanied by music. She also describes some of the gifts bestowed upon Louis XIV’s mistress Mme de Montespan by those trying to curry favor; in one case a magnificent chateau, and in another, a “golden crown, gold on gold, fitted over a golden brocade sheath, which was cross-woven with threads of various shades of gold – all of which adds up to the most heavenly fabric imaginable! Fairies must have woven it on some secret, mysterious loom of their own!”

Most of what we see in the book, however, is Madame de Sévigné’s family. Widowed early because her hotheaded husband got himself killed in a duel, she has two kids, a son and a daughter, but it’s the girl she loves to excess. She was devoted to her in ways which weren’t all that healthy to either of them, and which wasn’t entirely reciprocated, at least in the same way. When her daughter is married to Count Grignan who is then stationed in the Provence, Madame de Sévigné practically loses it in her grief. She pines for her in letter after letter, so much so, that I think the author, Frances Mossiker, should have trimmed some of this content down. Madame de Sévigné is correct in criticizing her daughter and son-in-law for running up massive debts gambling and living a lavish lifestyle, but she’s unbearable when she criticizes her for getting pregnant because it won’t allow them to do things together when she visits. It’s more than a little odd when she urges her 25-year-old daughter to sleep in separate beds. There is a weirdly jealous competition she has with her son-in-law for her daughter’s love, and regularly asserts that there is no love that can compete with parental love. Meanwhile, her son, a much warmer and more genuine person, gets some of her attention and love, but it pales in perspective, even though he’s off for years fighting in Louis XIV’s military campaigns.

Many have commented negatively on Madame de Sévigné’s daughter as being cold, unloving, and unworthy of her mother (in fact, the cold and intellectual daughter in Thornton Wilder’s ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey’ is modelled after her). All of that may be true, but her mother doesn’t come across as all that likeable either. Aside from the excessive mothering, she’s spoiled and mostly oblivious to the suffering of the poor, looking down on them with aristocratic disdain. As authorities descended on Brittany to quell a revolt and then began hanging people indiscriminately and randomly as well as torturing them via the wheel, she writes:

“The rebels of Rennes have fled, long since. Thus, the innocent will pay for the guilty, but I have no complaint so long as the four thousand soldiers at Rennes…do not interfere with my promenades in my forests where the trees grow marvelously tall and beautiful.”

There is a callousness here that we also in her daughter, who says loudly and often about a bourgeoisie girl she’s had to accept as a daughter-in-law (because of her own dire financial straits), that “it was necessary, from time to time, to add manure to the finest soil in the world,” and in the girl’s presence. For those same reasons she puts her oldest daughter (Madame de Sévigné’s granddaughter) in a convent at age 6, never to emerge again in life, because they are so wasteful of money that they know they won’t be able to afford a dowry, thought it apparently was a common practice for aristocratic families at the time.

Much is made of Madame de Sévigné’s beautiful letter writing, but to be honest I only got small glimpses of this and her wit in the letters that are excerpted. I hated it when Mosskier alludes to some aspect of her writing and then doesn’t quote it, and though I admire her meticulous research and scholarly approach, I sometimes felt like I was reading too much of Mossiker, and not enough Madame de Sévigné. An example of this is when she says:

“…one gathers from her letters that Madame de Sévigné faced life with all her senses open: she was enraptured by the autumnal splendor of the Livry woods, by the quality of moonlight filtering through the treetops at Les Rochers. Her descriptions of the rich, the golden butter of the Pré Valé, of the gamy orlotans and the luscious figs of Provence are mouth-watering, connotative of a supremely sensuous woman.”

And then doesn’t include the letters directly. Another is when she tells us that to keep her letters interesting when she was away from Paris and all the latest news from there, Madame de Sévigné populated them with amusing caricatures of a huge cast of people she ran across, many of whom were recurring over decades, but then says there is simply no space to include them beyond the ‘barest few’, and by that she does mean barest. Meanwhile, we get inordinate detail and quotation of her letters pining for her daughter. It’s a real disservice to what was apparently an imagination and writing style that had Virginia Woolf (among many others) saying that she would have been a great novelist in the present day. I wondered if the more interesting and evocative letters were sacrificed because the focus of the book is on biography.

Regardless, the result is that the 500+ page tome is a bit of a slog to get through. However, despite my issues with the biographer and her subject, I have to say, there is a common element of humanity in these letters which is sobering. We see the arc of this woman’s life, and even though we know that her death is coming in 1696, it still comes as a bit of a shock when we’ve read the last letter she ever wrote. She was feeling just fine at the age of 70, but then just a week later came down with a fever from which she never recovered (possibly due to something like the flu). We’ve read her letters of lamentation about the deaths of her friends that have preceded her, and we’re told by Mossiker how the lives of her family and correspondents play out. They all of course eventually die, and this little bubble of a world has completely passed on, which has a sadness to it. And, even though we see what brought on the revolution, it’s a little painful to read about the many ways her grave was desecrated in 1793.

Last little bits of constructive criticism: there are 10 photos of portraits and chateaus included, but they’re black and white and there probably should have been more, as well as a map to highlight the locations of the places Madame de Sévigné and her family stayed at or travelled along. A family tree would have been nice (though you can sketch one out as I did), and some type of note on converting the old currency amounts that are regularly thrown around (e.g. 4,000 livres in 1685) to something we can relate to would have been very helpful.

The bottom line for me is that if you’re looking to read a selection of Madame de Sévigné’s letters, you may want to poke around for alternatives before choosing this biography. Still, it’s not bad, especially if you want the full story of her life.

Quotes:
On overindulgence; I found this a little shocking as it was about her son Charles, who she openly exchanged notes with one of her friends about not having been able to perform with one of his lovers. This is in 1671, when Charles was just 23. Nine years later she will talk just as openly about a venereal disease he contracts:
“My son is not yet cured of that indisposition which makes his precious mistresses doubt his passion. He told me, yesterday evening, that during Holy Week, he had indulged in such awful debauchery that he had been overcome with dreadful disgust. He dared not think of it: it made him want to vomit. Everywhere around him, he seemed to see baskets full of breasts and thighs…baskets full of all sorts of things in such abundance that he could not get it out of his mind – nor yet can – and could not bear so much as even to look at a woman! He was like a horse to which hay had become repulsive.”

On walking at night, and the moon. This is from 1680, and one of the more poetic passages:
“The other evening, they came to me and said, ‘Madame, it is warm in the Mall; there is not so much as a breath of wind…and the moon is making magic there!’ I could not resist the temptation. I called up my infantry [her escorts], and put on a mass of bouquets, headgear and cloaks which were totally unnecessary. I went to the Mall where the air was as warm as in my chamber. I saw a thousand phantom shapes…white- and black-robed monks, gray- and white-robed nuns, sheets draped here and there, black men, men buried up against tree trunks, little men hidden so well that only their heads were showing, priests who dared not come too close. After having laughed at all those shadowy forms, and being convinced that they were what we call spirits – using our imaginations as their stage – we came back without stopping anywhere, and without having felt so much as a drop of moisture. My darling, forgive me, but I felt obliged – as did the Ancients – to pay my respects to the moon.” ( )