nine, the longed-for transition was only the quiet passing from
fevered dreams to peaceful sleep.

It is a singular fact that this refined, exclusive, fastidious
woman, in whom the artistic nature was always dominant to the
extent of weakness, should have left a request to be buried,
without ceremony, in the parish cemetery with the people, remote
alike from the tombs of her family and the saints of Port Royal.


CHAPTER VI. MADAME DE SEVIGNE
Her Genius--Her Youth--Her unworthy Husband--Her impertinent
Cousin--Her love for her Daughter--Her Letters--Hotel de
Carnavalet--Mme. Duiplessis Guenegaud--Mme. de Coulanges--The
Curtain Falls

Among the brilliant French women of the seventeenth century, no
one is so well-known today as Mme. de Sevigne. She has not only
been sung by poets and portrayed by historians, but she has left
us a complete record of her own life and her own character. Her
letters reflect every shade of her many-sided nature, as well as
the events, even the trifling incidents, of the world in which
she lived; the lineaments, the experiences, the virtues, and the
follies of the people whom she knew. We catch the changeful
tints of her mind that readily takes the complexion of those
about her, while retaining its independence; we are made familiar
with her small joys and sorrows, we laugh with her at her own
harmless weaknesses, we feel the inspiration of her sympathy, we
hear the innermost throbbings of her heart. No one was ever less
consciously a woman of letters. No one would have been more