To be sure, I do not mean that Madame de Sevigne wrote well without knowing it.  This is a thing of which a witty woman always has an inkling; and besides, her friends did not permit her to be ignorant of it.  “Your letters are delightful,” they told her, “and you are like your letters.”  It was all the easier to believe this, because she paid to herself in a whisper such compliments as others addressed to her aloud.  One day, when she had recently written to her friend Dr. Bourdelot, she said to her daughter, “Brava! what a good answer I sent him!  That is a foolish thing to say, but I had a good, wide-awake pen that day.”  It is very delightful to feel that one has wit, and we can understand how Madame de Sevigne might sometimes have yielded to this feeling with some satisfaction.  In her most private correspondence, that in which she least thought of the public, we might note certain passages in which she takes pleasure in elaborating and decorating her thought, and in adding to it new details more and more dainty and ingenious.  This she does without effort, to satisfy her own taste and to give herself the pleasure of expressing her thought agreeably.  It has been remarked that good talkers are not sensitive to the praises of others only:  they also wish to please themselves, independently of the public around them; and like to hear themselves talk.  It might be said in the same sense that Madame de Sevigne sometimes likes to see herself write.  This is one of those pretty artifices which in women do not exclude sincerity, and which may be united with naturalness.  Copyrighted by A.C.  McClurg and Company, Chicago.

FRENCH SOCIETY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

From the (Life of Madame de Sevigne)

Studying the seventeenth century in the histories is one thing, and seeking to become acquainted with it by reading contemporary letters is another and a far different thing.  The two procedures give rise to conflicting impressions.  Historians, taking a bird’s-eye view of their subject, portray its most general characteristics; they bring out only the prominent features, and sacrificing all the rest, draw pictures whose precision and simplicity captivate our minds.  We finally get into the habit of seeing an epoch as they have painted it, and cannot imagine there was anything in it besides the qualities they specify.  But when we read letters relating, without alteration or selection, events as they took place, the opinions of men and things we have drawn from the historians are greatly modified.  We then perceive that good and evil are at all times mingled, and even that the proportions of the mixture vary less than one would think.  Cousin says somewhere, “In a great age all is great.”  It is just the contrary that is true:  there is no age so great that there is not much littleness about it; and if we undertake to study history we should expect this, so as not to reckon without our host.  No epoch