130
PARTISAN REVIEW
and breasts." One is equally struck by the keen sense of rivalry Madame
de Sevigne expresses toward her son-in-law. She continually attempts to
prove that it is she, the mother, who should remain the center of her
daughter's affections. "How can a husband be worth a mother?" she
bursts out on one occasion. "The only love you can count on is mine,"
she writes her daughter. "['m the one person in the world who can love
you with total devotion. "
Before trying to unravel the elements of fact and fiction in Sevigne's
writings, [ have to make brief asides on the status of the letter as a lit–
erary genre in seventeenth-century france , and also, on a few ironies of
the Sevigne correspondence. This is a time when letters served as the
only medium of national news, particularly in the provinces, and a sig–
nificant portion of their contents was for public consumption, to be
shared with friends at the discretion of the recipient. [n addition, Sevi–
gne was writing at the precise time when the letter, long considered a
minor, marginal genre, was emerging in France as an important
autonomous literary form. And she was writing at the moment when
the male literary hierarchy-La Bruyere among others-were declaring
that women were superior to men at the art of the letter.
A typical missive from Madame de Sevigne
to
her daughter, dated
167 5,
touches on the following events: news of the war front in Holland
(including a mention of the way her son Charles distinguished himself
in battle); the death on the same battlefield of the century's greatest mil–
itary leader, General de Turenne; the appearance of a new work by the
Cardinal du Retz; a scandalous story about the King's homosexual
brother. That is the imformative portion of that particular week's cor–
respondence, a kind of gazette which the countess disseminated to her
acquaintances throughout France. Notwithstanding her standoffish atti–
tude towa rd her mother, she much sa vored her mother's letters.
The more personal parts of the missives, however, were meant to be
strictly private. They included moments of Sevigne's brooding religious
introspection-she was devout and worried a great deal about her
standing in God's eyes. "How will [ leave this life? How will [ appear
this side of God?" she writes in one such moment. "What can [ hope
for? Am [ worthy of Paradise? [s Hell my just dessert? What alterna–
tives? What a perplexity!" And these letters would inevitably include
those declarations of amorous passion for her daughter which make
Sevigne's missives so unique and so disturbing. Tortured accusations
that her daughter 'S affections will never match hers in intensity, artiCLI–
lations of unfounded jealousies, paranoid expressions of rivalry with the
countess's husband-the voicing of all those feelings, in sum, that show
