fACTS ANI) FICTIONS IN ALL THREE GE RES
135
mother and daughter's relationship at the time of the writer's death,
which came to her at the age of seventy. For the last decade of Sevigne's
life, the two women had gotten along increasingly well. One of the most
moving aspects of SevignC's spiritual journey, in fact, is her gradual
acknowledgement of her daughter's need for independence, her gradual
letting go, which is accompanied by a whole new level of religious accep–
tance, of what she called in her very Jansenist term "providence." Count–
ess de Grignan also mellowed, and displayed far greater tenderness and
openness with her mother. In the last two years of her life, Madame de
Shigne lived at the Grignans' castle in Provence, by the side of her
"invariable passion," as she called her child. She had gone there
to
nurse
her back
to
health frolll a long illness, and fell very ill herself from an ail–
ment that has never been determined, most probably a form of influenza.
The greatest mystery that attends her death is the following. During
the two weeks of the illness that carried her mother away, the countess
never set foot into her mother's sick rOOI11; she never even attended the
funeral. Even in her last days, SevignC's passion for her daughter was
stamped with absence. Over the centuries, the Countess de Grignan's
descendants have set forth several theories
to
protect her from a repu–
tation of heartlessness, such as the notion that she was not fully enough
recovered from her own illness to visit her mother. All such conjectures
have been discounted by contemporary historians, whose prevailing
view, at least in France, is the following: obsessed by the idolatrous
nature of her love and wishing
to
make one great final penance, it was
Madame de Sevigne herself who forbade her daughter to come into her
room for a last visit. As a prerequisite to entering the presence of her
Maker, in her last days she may have made the supreme sacrifice and
denied herself her life's greatest treasure-her daughter'S presence.
The final irony of Sevigne's correspondence is that within a few
decades of her death, this most prominent and pathological of maternal
infatuations was virtually sanctified in France as a paragon of maternal
emotion. By
1830,
her stature had become so iconic that she was wel–
comed into the highest ranks of the French literary pantheon. She was
the very first writer chosen to inaugurate the "Grands Ecrivains de
France" series, which later became a model for the Pleiade editions of
our own era. One is indeed grateful for those elements of zaniness in
French culture which apotheosized Sevigne, thus assuring the careful
preservation of her texts. One is equally grateful for the total dearth of
any psychoanalytic self-consciousness in her time, which might have
censored her emotions.
It
enabled her to offer us that extremely rare lit–
erary phenomenon-an expression of maternal passion in its most
