brilliant world of the second half of the century of which they
are among the most illustrious representatives. The young Marie-
Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne had inherited a taste for letters
and was carefully instructed by her father, who was a field-
marshal and the governor of Havre, where he died when she was
only fifteen. She had not passed the first flush of youth when
her mother contracted a second marriage with the Chevalier Renaud
de Sevigne, whose name figures among the frondeurs as the ardent
friend of Cardinal de Retz, and later among the devout Port
Royalists. It is a fact of more interest to us that he was an
uncle of the Marquis de Sevigne, and the best result of the
marriage to the young girl, who was not at all pleased and whose
fortunes it clouded a little, was to bring her into close
relations with the woman to whom we owe the most intimate details
of her life.

The rare natural gifts of Mlle. De La Vergne were not left
without due cultivation. Rapin and Menage taught her Latin.
"That tiresome Menage," as she lightly called him, did not fail,
according to his custom, to lose his susceptible heart to the
remarkable pupil who, after three months of study, translated
Virgil and Horace better than her masters. He put this amiable
weakness on record in many Latin and Italian verses, in which he
addresses her as Laverna, a name more musical than flattering, if
one recalls its Latin significance. She received an education of
another sort, in the salon of her mother, a woman of much
intelligence, as well as a good deal of vanity, who posed a
little as a patroness of letters, gathering about her a circle of
beaux esprits, and in other ways signaling the taste which was a
heritage from her Provencal ancestry. On can readily imagine the