to scold her, nor send her away to the convent as she did her
sister Marie-Blanche. With what infinite tenderness she always
speaks of this child, smiling at her small outbursts of temper,
soothing her little griefs, and giving wise counsels about her
education. Evidently she doubted the patience of the mother.
"You do not yet too well comprehend maternal love," she writes;
"so much the better, my child; it is violent."

Unfortunately this adoring mother could not get on very well with
her daughter when they were together. She drowned her with
affection, she fatigued her with care for her health, she was
hurt by her ungracious manner, she was frozen by her indifference
in short, they killed each other. It is not a rare thing to
make a cult of a distant idol, and to find one's self unequal to
the perpetual shock of the small collisions which diversities of
taste and temperament render inevitable in daily intercourse. In
this instance, one can readily imagine that a love so interwoven
with every fiber of the mother's life, must have been a little
over-sensitive, a little exacting, a trifle too demonstrative for
the colder nature of the daughter; but that it was the less
genuine and profound, no one who has at all studied the character
of Mme. de Sevigne can for a moment imagine. How she suffers
when it becomes necessary for Mme. de Grignan to go back to
Provence! How the tears flow! How readily she forgives all,
even to denying that there is anything to forgive. "A word, a
sweetness, a return, a caress, a tenderness, disarms me, cures me
in a moment," she writes. And again: "Would to God, my daughter,
that I might see you once more at the Hotel de Carnavalet, not
for eight days, nor to make there a penitence, but to embrace you
and to make you see clearly that I cannot be happy without you,