In an essential book published two years ago, The Grand Siècle in the feminine (Perrin), Marie-Joëlle Guillaume recalled that the 17th century was a “golden age of French civilization”, “so true is it that the incredible charm of this era is due to an exquisite familiarity between men and women, from the shared chivalrous ideal during the Fronde, to the exploration of the human heart then pushed together to the depths of consciences”. Two friends particularly distinguished themselves in the field of introspection, one with spleen and gravity, the other with swing and gaiety: Mme de La Fayette (nicknamed “the Fog”) and Mme de Sévigné. It is on the latter that the academic Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac wrote a remarkable book, published by Flammarion and which has just received the Prix Goncourt for biography. An ideal read to immerse oneself in a society more refined than ours.
Not everyone has the privilege of having a saintly grandmother. Born in Paris in 1626, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, future Marquise de Sévigné, is the granddaughter of Jeanne de Chantal, the founder of the Visitandine order with Saint Francis de Sales, who will be canonized in 1767. Orphaned at the age of 7, little Marie was raised in religious austerity as much as in a certain fantasy. If we often speak of the spirit of the Mortemarts, that of the Rabutins was not bad either – with her cousin Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, Marie will cultivate the art of humor all her life. The year she turns 18, the young woman is married to Henri de Sévigné, from an honest Breton nobility (we are not talking about a Rohan after all). In her tasty Storys, Tallemant des Réaux mocks this spendthrift, unfaithful, braggart and quarrelsome little marquis, who dies in a duel in 1651. Mme de Sévigné finds herself a widow at 25. Didn’t Mlle de Scudéry show that one could remain eternally single? Despite the many suitors who will court her (including Turenne), the marquise will never remarry. Between Paris and her Château des Rochers, she has better things to do.
In addition to raising her two children (a daughter and a son), she is interested in literature and thought. She is received at the Blue Room, the famous salon of Madame de Rambouillet. Willingly dissident, the marquise will be the friend of Cardinal de Retz and Nicolas Fouquet. She also frequented the Hôtel de Nevers, home of the Plessis-Guénégauds and center of opposition to Mazarin, as well as the Port-Royal clan – it was at her home that the sixth letter of the Provincial by Pascal. Madame de Sévigné is a modern woman who will be particularly struck by a progress of her time: “What a beautiful invention the post office is!” Louvois has in fact unified the postal system and facilitated the connection of relays between them. After marrying the Count of Grignan, in 1669, Madame de Sévigné’s daughter goes to settle in her husband’s castle, in Drôme Provençale. Her mother begins to suffer from the separation. Then she begins to write to her daughter, more and more abundantly, and this will give rise to one of the most famous correspondences in our literary history.
“The letter is above all an addressed form”
“Singular things always delight me,” said the Marquise (this could be her motto), and her letters are a celebration. Everything amuses or touches her. Everything inspires her. She likes to jump from one thing to another and can, in the same letter, laugh at gossip, then dissect the philosophy of Saint Augustine. According to Saint-Simon, “this woman, by her ease, her natural graces, the sweetness of her mind, gave it through her conversation to those who had none.” She gives this advice to those to whom she addresses herself: one must “let the pens trot where they will.” With a fluidity that would much later be that of Stendhal, mixing noble style and everyday or even vulgar language, forging neologisms by snapping her fingers, she rediscovers in writing the evidence of orality. Influenced by Jansenism, she sometimes becomes more profound. Proust went so far as to find a “Dostoyevsky side” to this correspondence. Virginia Woolf esteemed it. Sainte-Beuve praised its verve worthy of Molière. As for Lamartine, he confided that, when he was little, he received as a reward the reading of a letter from the marquise when he was good. Not sure that there are still children who are educated like this…
If Mme de Sévigné remains an essential letter writer, she never considered herself a writer, as Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac confirms to us: “She did not have this ambition in the sense in which we understand it today. She knows that her letters are pleasant. Her recipients affirm this. However, she never took advantage of the opportunities offered to her to become an author, after the publication of. The Princess of Cleves, suggests that she write a work with two pens, as he supposes Mme de La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld did. She does not seize the opportunity. What she likes is writing to a chosen recipient, the pleasure of exchanges in a limited circle and not the prospect of a large and anonymous readership. The letter is above all an addressed form. If some letters were divulged during her lifetime – think of the canonical letters on Mademoiselle’s marriage or on Vatel’s death – this effect is proportionally limited compared to the mass of intimate or familiar texts. The letter writer has the talents of a chronicler, and sometimes even of a playwright, when she stages the protagonists of her stories; but writing a letter is recreating a company, transforming the suffering of absence into shared pleasure, making a treasure of lack. According to the Ciceronian formula, the letter is ‘the consolation of the absent’.”
To our knowledge, the name of Madame de Sévigné does not appear in the essays of Mona Chollet and her followers. Can the marquise be a model for today’s feminists? “I have the impression that she can speak to women of the 21st century, Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac tells us, whether or not they are feminists. She accompanied the movement of women’s emancipation through culture with the learned and precious women of her time. Her intellectual curiosity, her immense appetite for reading, her life choices that always avoided the easy way out make her a living woman. Her independence as a widow is not imposed but chosen. Sensitive and affectionate, she likes to please but refuses the risk of new motherhoods, considered alienating. She has the strength to say no. Her relationship with religion is also free: she does not bother with ritual.”
Correspondence specialist (she directs the journal Epistolary), Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac sees in the second half of the Grand Siècle the rise of the genre, whose blossoming continued until the Age of Enlightenment, when “the letter became the vehicle of philosophical thought”, Diderot and Rousseau playing on the whole range and Voltaire using it for propaganda purposes (Calas affair, etc.). In the pantheon of letter writers, in addition to her dear Marquise, she would include Mme de Maintenon, Mme du Deffand, Mme de Staël, George Sand, Colette, Louise de Vilmorin, Marguerite Yourcenar and Simone de Beauvoir. Resolution for this summer: rather than typing inane messages full of spelling mistakes on WhatsApp all day long, we will lock ourselves away in peace with the brilliant correspondence of these ladies.
Madame de Sevigne, by Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac. Flammarion, 600 p., €26.
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