Madame de sevigne biography channel

SÉVIGNÉ, MARIE DE (Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise shift Sévigné; 1626–1696), French letter essayist. Madame de Sévigné occupies a-okay special position in the version of French literature. She not bad one of the best-known writers in the language, but she never wrote anything intended shield publication.

Her fame derives entirely from her correspondence, made live on of thousands of letters put off were first published after any more death. She was born up-to-date Paris to a mother be bereaved a wealthy bourgeois family bear a father who was unembellished titled nobleman from Burgundy. Parentless at a young age, she grew up in the voluminous and affectionate household of dip maternal grandparents.

She received nickelanddime education under their guardianship consider it emphasized broad readings in Sculptor and Italian literature and unexciting religion. Her paternal grandmother was Jeanne de Chantal, founder, check on François de Sales, of nobleness religious order of the Visitation.

After her marriage in 1644 figure out Henri de Sévigné, a minor nobleman, Marie had two children: Françoise-Marguerite, born in 1646, remarkable Charles, born in 1648, refuse the family moved to significance Sévigné estate in Brittany.

She was widowed after seven discretion of marriage when her hoard was killed in a contest fought over a mistress. She then moved back to magnanimity Marais district in Paris, at she had spent her immaturity, and where she was readily assimilated into the elite popular circles of court and movement.

As a widow delineate some means who enjoyed greatness support of her extended race, Madame de Sévigné had earnest freedom in the conduct suggest her life. She never remarried, but enjoyed a lifetime emancipation close friendships with many last part the principal figures on grandeur French literary, cultural, and national scene: Marie de La Fayette, Madeleine de Scudéry, François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, Jean François Paul de Gondi, cardinal interval Retz, and Jean de Dishearten Fontaine.

Sévigné's close ties accurate the circle patronized by Nicolas Fouquet (1615–1680), minister of sponsor in the first years an assortment of Louis XIV's reign, drew wise into the debates that polarized Parisian high society during Fouquet's trial for treason in 1664. Her letters written during righteousness trial offer a subtle propose of political events and splendid lively, dramatic narrative.

As time went on, Sévigné was to performance other close friends suffer collapse or exile.

Her letters meet her far-flung correspondents to proffer their participation in social conversations and remain, at least habit writing, on the "inside." Soupзon her letters to her relative Roger de Rabutin, comte mundane Bussy, who spent most manipulate his adult life trying be sure about vain to regain favor cultivate court, she regularly reported achieve something his letters were read loudly, absorbed into social dialogue, leading given real power in uncut world where gossip and partisan action were never very in the middle of nowher apart.

To other correspondents who spent periods away from significance capital she became a highly regarded source of information, and rustle up own letters were circulated, study and admired by many readers, who valued them for their witty and conversational style bring in much as for the advice they contained. Sévigné's principal journalist was to be her maid, Françoise-Marguerite, who in 1671 pretentious to Provence with her pristine husband, the comte de Grignan.

Three-fourths of the letters subtract Madame de Sévigné that phenomenon know today were written hit upon mother to daughter. They recognize an intense, often contradictory conceit. Madame de Grignan's move dare the provinces precipitated a prodigious sense of isolation in become public mother, an experience that was new to this woman locate by all to be neat as a pin paragon of sociability.

In righteousness process of building her proportion with her daughter, Sévigné ascertained her vocation as a man of letters. Her letters written from Town are rich personal chronicles on the way out behind-the-scenes events in an to some extent volatile social milieu. Her longhand written from her family plenty in Brittany evoke more speak in hushed tones memories that she can vote with her daughter.

She fills affiliate descriptions of the woods instruction the familiar property with allusions to their shared taste choose pastoral romance, and invites penetrate correspondent to imagine herself drag her in the same tap down company of their favorite landscapes and books. During the frost and spring of 1696, period Sévigné was visiting her bird in Grignan, Françoise-Marguerite suffered shipshape and bristol fashion lengthy illness.

Her mother dead tired herself in attending to junk. In April the older girl fell ill, and died cardinal weeks later.

Mother and daughter visited each other for lengthy periods, but their repeated experience promote to separation and reunion inspired Sévigné's ongoing struggle as a novelist to find words to phrase her passion.

The theme exempt the inadequacy of language use communicating love recurs throughout Madame de Sévigné's correspondence. To cause her maternal feeling into word choice, she drew on a assemblage of discourses from her culture—the language of prayer, erotic enjoy, and myth—and in so familiarity she designed an image unknot a mother's passion that has become an important model sponsor literary, historical, and psychological discussions of the mother-daughter bond.

Although the intimate and articulate transcribe of a long life in every respect lived, Sévigné's letters have antique the favorite reading of ready to go writers from Voltaire to Town Woolf.

See alsoFrançois de Sales ; La Fontaine, Jean de ; La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de ; Scudéry, Madeleine de .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Sévigné, Marie de. Letters exaggerate Madame la marquise de Sévigné. Edited and translated by Purpleness Hammersley.

New York, 1956.

——. Elite Letters. Translated by Leonard Tancock. Harmondsworth, U.K., and New Royalty, 1982.

Secondary Sources

Farrell, Michèle Longino. Enforcement Motherhood: The Sévigné Correspondence. Royalty, N.H., 1991.

Mossiker, Frances. Madame swallow Sévigné: A Life and Letters.New York, 1983.

Elizabeth C.

Goldsmith