fACTS AND FICTIONS IN ALL THREE GENRES
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with an enthusiasm that would even please Andrea Dworkin. "The state
of widowhood spells liberty," she writes to a recently widowed niece.
She tells another friend that her true birthday falls on the date her wid–
owhood began, when she was reborn into a gentle and happy life.
It says something about the highly feminized climate of seventeenth–
century French culture that within a few years of being widowed Sevi–
gne established a central place in Paris society, solely through her
intellectual gifts. She frequented that circle of Bluestocking women,
called
les Precieuses,
so satirized by Moliere, who played a key role in
his feminization of seventeenth-century French society. She became an
intimate friend of Madame de La Fayette, author of
La Princesse de
Cleves,
and of her two rejected suitors, La Rochefoucauld and Fouquet.
But she did nothing with her talents until the age of forty-three, when
she was literally born as a writer through the following circumstances:
her daughter, the beautiful, spoiled, aloof Fran<;:oise had married the
Count de Grignan, a distinguished Proven<;:al lord. Because of her
charmless reserve and haughty manner, Fran<;:oise had not attracted any
serious suitors until the perilously late age of twenty-three.
The couple first lived with the bride's mother in Paris. But a year into
their marriage, Grignan was appointed governor of his native Provence,
an often dangerous fifteen-day journey from the capital. Sevigne's daugh–
ter had to follow her husband to his ancestral home, north of Avignon,
and the voluminous flow of letters Sevigne wrote to her daughter was a
way of surviving the terrible sorrow of the separation, which became the
central and organizing fact of her life. In the following twenty-five years,
Sevigne would write several times a week, an average of some twenty-five–
hundred folio pages a year,
to
her daughter. "Still weeping, still swooning
with grief, I look in vain for my dear daughter." So begins the correspon–
dence the very day the Countess de Grignan leaves for Provence. "Oh,
what a cruel separation it is; I spent five hours sobbing incessantly. I went
to
Madame de La Fayette, who only intensified my grief by sharing in it."
Three days later she writes: "My passion for you is the one we should
have for God, if we did have religious duty. You are my heart's sole pas–
sion, my life's greatest joy and sorrow." A fortnight later, Sevigne stands
by a window on the top floor of her house, contemplating suicide
because of a painful lon ging for her child. She chooses
to
live on, but
puts up a large screen in her living room
to
hide the painful view of her
daughter'S empty bedroom.
One is struck by the erotic impulses that imbue the mother's desper–
ate letters, such as this phrase censored out of all editions of Sevigne
until twenty years ago: "I kiss with all my heart your beautiful cheeks
