M. du Bled most admirably sums up her character and writings in the following:  “She is the person who most resembles her writings—­that is, those that are found; for alas! many (the most confidential, the most interesting, I think) are lost forever:  in them she is reflected as she reflects French society in them.  Endowed—­morally and physically—­with a robust health, she is expansive, loyal, confiding, impressionable, loving gayety in full abundance as much as she does the smile of the refined, as eager for the prattle of the court as for solid reading, smitten with nobiliary pride, a captive of the prejudices, superstitions and tastes of her caste (or of even her coterie), with her pen hardly tender for her neighbor—­her daughter and intimates excepted.  A manager and a woman of imagination, a Frondist at the bottom of her soul, and somewhat of a Jansenist—­not enough, however, not to cry out that Louis XIV. will obscure the glory of his predecessors because he had just danced with her—­faithful to her friends (Retz, Fouquet, Pomponne) in disgrace and detesting their persecutors, seeking the favor of court for her children.  In the salons, she is celebrated for her esprit—­and this at an age when one seldom thinks about reputation, when one is like the princess who replied to a question on the state of her soul, ’At twenty one has no soul;’ and she possesses the qualities that are so essential to style—­natural eclat, originality of expression, grace, color, amplitude without pomposity and abundance without prolixity; moreover, she invents nothing, but, knowing how to observe and to express in perfection everything she had seen and felt, she is a witness and painter of her century:  also, she loves nature—­a sentiment very rare in the seventeenth century.”

Mme. de Sevigne was endowed with the best qualities of the French race—­good will and friendliness, which influence one to judge others favorably and to desire their esteem; of a very impressionable nature, she was gifted with a natural eloquence which enabled her to express her various emotions in a light or gay vein which often bordered on irony.  Affectionate and appreciative and tender and kind to everyone in general, toward those whom she loved she was generous to a fault and unswerving in her fidelity.

Her last years were spent in the midst of her family.  She died in 1696, of small-pox, thanking God that she was the first to go, after having trembled for the life of her daughter, whom she had nursed back to health after a long and dangerous illness.  Her son-in-law, M. de Grignan, wrote to her uncle, M. de Coulanges: 

“What calls far more for our admiration than for our regret, is the spectacle of a brave woman facing death—­of which she had no doubt from the first days of her illness—­with astounding firmness and submission.  This person, so tender and so weak towards all whom she loved, showed nothing but courage and piety when she believed that her hour had come; and, impressed by the use she managed to make of that good store in the last moments of her life, we could not but remark of what utility and of what importance it is to have the mind stocked with the good matter and holy reading for which Mme. de Sevigne had a liking—­not to say a wonderful hunger.”