GOOD COMPANY
MADAME DE SEVIGNE: HER LETTERS AND HER WORLD. By Arthur Stanley. Eyre and Spottiswoode.
of the great letter-writers and diarists have been entirely free from self-consciousness. It does not detract from her literary merits that the Marquise de Sévigné seems to have been well aware of them herself, even though they were displayed, comparatively, in private. I say "comparatively" because any letter which passed ‘by the hands of the Royal Post of Louis XIV. was censored, and, if considered objectionable, would simply disappear. Moreover, her letters during _ her own lifetime would be passed from friend to friend for admiration. This is an agreeable book about an agreeable woman living in an age which was itself full of self-confidence and joy of life, but which history, the implacable adjuster, has condemned on account of fits consequences: universal ‘hatred, military defeat, and bankruptcy. France was never "greater" relatively than in the middle of the reign of Louis XIV., xz is questionable whether any
not even in the days of Napoleon. Sev-enteenth-century France was Europe, and French society was the focus of civilisation. Madame de Sévigné, probably the greatest letter-writer of any time and any country, was in fact more than a pleasant prattler, but this somewhat staid translation of less than a sixth of her letters does sometimes make one wonder whether it was not in great part due to the events which she witnessed, the great court at which she intermittently appeared, and the purely histor@cal interest of her correspondence that she is. accorded such a high place in French literature. This is perhaps because Arthur Stanley’s express object has been to "show the famous Marquise against the background of her time"; his unobtrusive but informative comments gracefully accomplish that end. But he also shows us a woman, The mother of an ungrateful daughter whom she loved beyond reason, Madame de Sévigné was in some degree a kind of female Pere Goriot, and it is a little disconcerting to find Mr. Stanley so generously and persistently trying to ascribe the best of all possible motives to everybody connected with his main character as well as to herself in all contexts. This book, with its excellent illustrations, is not merely a pleasant footnote to history: it has a warm life of its own. Arthur Stanley introduces us to a woman of strong mind who was both a gossip and a philosopher, a_ great beauty and a great wit, a lover of woodland solitude and a brilliant figure in a brilliant court,'a rich heiress and an anxious manager struggling with diminishing means to help her children.
DAVID
HALL
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 389, 6 December 1946, Page 29
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437GOOD COMPANY New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 389, 6 December 1946, Page 29
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