SEVIGNE, MARIE DE RABUTIN-CHANTAL, MAR QUISE DE (1626-1696), French letter-writer, was born at Paris on Feb. 5, 1626. The family of Rabutin (if not so illustrious as Bussy, Madame de Sevigne's notorious cousin, affected to consider it) was one of great age and distinction in Burgundy. Marie's father, Celse Benigne de Rabutin, Baron de Chantal, was killed during the English descent on the Isle of Rhe in July 1627. His wife did not long survive him many years, and Marie was left an orphan at the age of seven. At the age of ten she passed into the guardianship of her uncle Christophe de Coulanges, abbe de Livry. Readers of his niece's letters know how well "Le Bien Bon" fulfilled the trust. Long after his nominal duties were ended he was in all matters of business the good angel of the family, while for half a century his abbacy of Livry was the favourite residence both of his niece and her daughter. Coulanges provided his niece with an admirable education. Jean Chapelain and Gilles Ménage are specially mentioned as her tutors, and Ménage at least fell in love with her. Another literary friend of her youth was the poet Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin. She was intimate with all the coterie of the Hotel Rambouillet, and her special ally was Mademoiselle de la Vergne, afterwards Madame de la Fayette. In person she was extremely attractive, though the mihute critics of the time objected to her divers deviations from regular beauty. Her long minority, under so careful a guardian as Coulanges, had also raised her fortune to the amount of ioo,000 crowns. She married (1644) Henri, marquis de Sevigne, a Breton gentleman of good family, allied to the oldest houses of that province, but of no great estate. They settled at Sevigne's manor-house of Les Rochers, near Vitre. It may be suspected that the happiest days of Madame de Sevigne's brief married life were spent there. For there at any rate her husband had less opportunity than in Paris of neglecting her, and of wasting her money and his own. Henri de Sevigne was one of
the innumerable lovers of Ninon de l'Enclos, and made himself even more conspicuous with a certain Madame de Gondran, known in the nickname slang of the time as "La Belle Lolo." He was wildly extravagant. That his wife loved him and that he did not love her was generally admitted. He quarrelled with the Chevalier d'Albret about Madame de Gondran, fought with him and was mortally wounded on Feb. 4, 1651.
There is no reasonable doubt that his wife regretted him a great deal more than he deserved. Though only five and twenty, and more beautiful than ever, she never married again. For the rest of her life she gave herself up to her two children, Francoise Marguerite (b. 1646), and Charles (1648). To Charles Madame de Sevigne was an indulgent, a generous (though not altogether just) and in a way an affectionate mother. Her daughter, the future Madame de Grignan, she worshipped with an almost insane affection. For nearly ten years she lived an uneventful life at Paris in a house she occupied in the Place Royale (not as yet in the famous Hotel Carnavalet), at Les Rochers, at Livry or at her own estate of Bourbilly in the Maconnais. She had, how ever, in 1658, a quarrel with her cousin Bussy over a loan. He gives a malicious portrait of her in his Histoire amoureuse. The quarrel was never quite healed, though after Bussy's disgrace in 1666 correspondence was renewed.
In 1661, at the downfall of the Superintendent Fouquet, it was announced on indubitable authority that communications from Madame de Sevigne had been found in the coffer where Fouquet kept his love letters. Bussy obtained from Le Tellier, who as minister had examined the letters, a corroboration of her protest that the letters were merely those of a friend. Nevertheless, there have always been those who held that Madame de Sevigne regarded Fouquet with at least a very warm kind of friendship. During these earlier years Madame de Sevigne had a great affec tion for the establishment of Port Royal.