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PARTISAN REVIEW
was hardly lost to Sevigne. When Lully's opera "Proserpine" opened at
court, she drew playful analogies between its plot and her own life, cast–
ing the count, of course, as Pluto.
Absence, indeed, marks every aspect of this correspondence, for
another irony is that it is one-sided. Countess de Grignan's letters to her
mother were all destroyed by her descendants. In one of the few writing
samples that remain, the postscript of a note the countess had written
to her cousin, she intimates that she can't abide her mother's invasive–
ness, and can't wait to get back to her husband. Otherwise, we can only
guess at her responses to her mother's prehensile love. She appears to be
torn, deeply guilt-ridden by the conflict of loyalties apparently imposed
on her. But apart from a few comments from contemporaries concern–
ing the countess's aloofness and general nastiness, she only echoes back
to us obliquely through her mother's letters, as through a maze of dis–
torting mirrors.
A third irony in this correspondence is that Madame de Sevigne had
two offspring, two "love objects" to choose from, and she chose her
remote, secretive daughter over her affectionate, demonstrative son.
Charles de Sevigne looks on his mother as his closest confidante. He
even runs home to tell her about his moments of sexual impotence, shar–
ing the news with her with a candor which makes contemporary family
relations seem rabidly repressed. "We laughed uproariously," Shigne
writes her daughter about her son's report of a sexual fiasco. "He laid
the blame on me, saying he had inherited my frigidity." So Charles is a
learned, witty, devoted companion who shares many traits and tastes
with his mother. Unlike his sister, who vents her resentment of mom in
fits of rage, he heeds her advice with touching docility-and yet Sevigne
is rather indifferent to this delicious, accommodating son. Perhaps he is
too present to be loved in the truly Proustian sense. To the last, it is the
remote, uncommunicative daughter who would remain, in Sevigne's
words, "my heart's unique passion, my life's only pleasure and pain."
I'm finally ready to get to the pith of the question that concerns this
particular panel: What is the balance of fact and fiction in the memoirs
and autobiographical entries evolved over a quarter of a century in
Sevigne's letters? History's judgment is that the memoirist passages are
extremely true to fact. Those segments in which she displays her talent
as a social, political, and literary chronicler are deemed to be as accu–
rate as the most meticulous historical recording of the period, and
often more accurate than Saint-Simon's. Such passages record a vast
spectrum of themes-Louis XIV's shifting of affection to various mis–
tresses and numerous more absurd aspects of the Sun King's reign, such
