The Précieuses Ridicules.'

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priately rewarded the high priest of his worship by bestowing upon him the moiety of a bishop's revenue. Benserade was a clever fellow! He contrived to insinuate himself into the favour of the stern Richelieu; he hoodwinked the wily Mazarin; he steered through the Fronde without offending either party; and he won the personal friendship of the vain and fickle Louis. Yet he was said to have been generous at heart, and to have solicited more favours for his friends than for himself. Madame de Sévigné, in one of her letters, mentions her having met him at a dinner party of which he was the grand attraction, and calls him a delightful fellow. Molière disturbed his happiness, and affected his

renown.

The king, whose literary taste, at least in early life, may be judged by the Masques, in which he himself cut so strange a figure, showed always a marked dislike for female authorship. There is strong reason to conclude that when Molière, in 1659, wrote his Précieuses Ridicules' he was as much incited to his attack upon literary ladies by a desire to please the monarch, as by the palpable pedantry into which the disciples of the Rambouillet school had declined. This little farce told fatally against bas bleuism. Ménage, the tutor of Madame de Sévigné, has recorded his testimony of the effect produced by its first representation. All the Hôtel de Rambouillet were present, and at the close of the piece Ménage acknowledges that he thus addressed his friends: We may now say as St. Remus said to Clovis-we must burn the idols we adored, and adore those we would have burned:' then descending from his own pedantic tone, he adds quaintly, This satire knocked down galimatias and the forced style of writing.' The weakest point presented to the attack of the inimitable satirist, was of course the extravagant affectation of language.

Having sketched thus briefly and rapidly the history of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, from its foundation by the noble, frank, generous, or as her faithful servant better termed her, la grande Marquise, to the period of its decline, we arrive at the immediate object of M. de Walckenaer's book, the celebrated Madame de Sévigné.

Ménage, whose name we have last introduced as her tutor, was so fascinated by his pupil that he fell in love with her. Poor old pedant! he must have had some excellent qualities, for he had many enemies: provoked more by the incautious exhibition of his self-love than of his enmity, for his nature appears to have been amiable. We are drifting into a digression we cannot avoid-but this tutor meeting us at the threshold, we must have a word with him, or about him, before we claim brief interview with his

charming pupil. The latter amused herself with a passion, which it is needless to say could have only been made matter for diversion. But this Ménage could not understand. He wondered that Madame de Sévigné showed no fear of him—a gallant of such attraction. One day, she quietly desired him to take the place in her carriage vacant by the absence of her dame de compagnie. He opened his eyes, astonished at such a mark of contempt for public opinion, and at such a challenging of personal danger. 'Come, come,' said she quickly, and sit beside me: and if you do not well behave yourself, I shall visit you at your own house.' To his bewilderment she kept her word. Ménage was not so fortunate as to meet in every friend a Madame de Sévigné. Never did unhappy author excite such a host of enemies. Fleeting however would have been the effect of enmity or friendship on his name, had it not become linked with the attachment of a Sévigné and the enmity of a Molière. The comedy of Les Femmes Savantes,' written eleven years after the 'Précieuses Ridicules,' was levelled chiefly against Ménage (introduced under the name of Vadius), and gave the coup de grace to pedantry and philosophical jargon.

In looking over the collection of reflections, criticisms, and anecdotes which this author left under the title of Menagiana,' we are inclined to think he was dealt with hardly. Under the surface of his learned display there runs a current of wholesome thought and good feeling. We find him lamenting, as authors have in all ages of civilization lamented, that his own age was not poetical, and learnedly accounting for the more poetical character of the ancients by the poetical form of their religious worship. Of Mademoiselle de Scudery he is a fervent admirer, for the characteristic reason that he finds in her romances an analogy with the Epic poem: which, giving but one event of a hero's life, would, he assures us, be wanting in impressiveness were it not ingeniously lengthened by well-contrived digressions. He wrote most of his poetical pieces in the ancient languages, and says it was not until he began to write in his own that he was made the victim of so much enmity and jealousy. It is indeed true, that however men may consent to superiority in one branch of art they rebel against assumed versatility. It will be fair to add, that an anecdote told by Ménage of himself justifies the discriminating friendship of his clever pupil, even against Molière. He says that the attacks of his enemies became at last insupportable, and he determined to abandon the city, and to pass the remainder of his days in solitude. In the rural retreat which he selected, he amused himself with rearing pigeons. One day a

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favourite was shot, and Ménage grieved bitterly over his lost bird, but Alas!' he suddenly exclaimed, I find that no human. residence is free from troubles. Let me then have only those to encounter which confer in the contest some degree of dignity' and he returned to Paris.

Since we first saw Madame de Sévigné binding the eyes of Mademoiselle de la Vergne for a game of Colin Maillard, we have only from time to time caught glances of her. Although the author of these memoirs links to her name a history of the troubles of the Fronde, she was in no way mixed up with them; nor do they appear to have directly affected either her genius or character until her daughter had grown up, and she felt it her duty to forward her prospects in life. Madame de Sévigné did not abandon her solitude in Brittany. When she did appear at court, then deemed a sublunary paradise reserved for the élite of mortals only, her stay was not long nor continuous: her fortune not being equal to the expenses attendant upon such costly favour. With the removal of her daughter to her husband's château on the Rhine, comes the first of that inimitable collection of letters, which have made her name immortal.

What freshness do they breathe-what boundless animal spiritswhat exquisite truth and heart-what sound sense-what mild and gracious insinuations, rather than inculcations, of wise maximswhat pictures of rural happiness-what delicious rustic repasts! Her books too-history, poetry, philosophy-Pascal and Nicolle -all the sound food of a healthy mind. Then the vivid pictures of passing events, caught in her visits to court, or reflected from the pens of such correspondents as Madame de Lafayette, or Bussy de Rabutin. And all the offering of an overflowing tenderness to a well-beloved daughter! Who does not think and speak of Madame de Sévigné, indeed, as almost a beloved friend that he has known, Even M. de Walckenaer, calm historian as he is, introduces her in this referential, take-for-granted way: This complexion of such rare freshness, this rich fair hair, these brilliant and animated eyes, this irregular but expressive physiognomy, this elegant figure, were so many gifts from nature. And then her sweet voice, cultivated to the highest degree, according to the musical science of the time, and her brilliant danse which drew out with éclat the liveliness and habitual gracefulness of her movements.' We have all that general description which is as the recalling to mind of a friend whom every body has seen, and all appreciated, and upon whose traits we love to dwell. It has been charged by some that affection for her daughter was too prominently put forward, as if in abandoning literary pedantry she had

fallen into an affectation of another kind, not less obnoxious. But no! In solitude when at home, surrounded by a highly artificial society abroad, she needed an object for the currents of her warm impulses to overflow upon, and towards that object they rushed with giddy delight, and painful and even foolish fondness. With our present unerring and rapid means of communication, and our general penny post, we have but a feeble idea of the elixir of happiness which in old times could be enveloped in a sheet of paper. Poor Madame de Sévigné cannot contain her delight at the post-office improvement of her time, according to which a horse courier was despatched from Paris once a week! She tells us of the pleasure the faces of these couriers, whenever she met them upon the high-road, used to afford her—and no wonder, for at that time the journey of a courier was one of peril and adventure. Of pleasant excitement too! How the smack of his whip, and the sound of his horse's hoof, must have brought every face to the windows of a country château. With what honours he must have been received. An ambassador, even he of Siam, delivering his credentials at Versailles, would have cut but a poor figure beside the bearer of a packet of letters from Madame de Sévigné. He was a mercury alighting upon a heaven kissing hill-a god! What prayers must have accompanied his departure what blessings hailed his arrival. How his horse must have been patted and fed, and the best bed given to him—and then picture the family circle around the adventurous letters, and, provided there were no very special family secrets therein, fancy the kind friends and neighbours invited to partake of that family joy and the family repast.

It is probable that serious secrets were seldom thus conveyed because of the danger of the times. When Mazarin was obliged during the Fronde to yield to the clamours of his enemies, and to withdraw into voluntary exile, he and Anne of Austria corresponded by word of mouth, through confidential couriers who carried their despatches in their heads. A serious family affair would, even at a later period, demand a journey from one of its heads. But a letter then filled many of the objects now supplied by a newspaper, and hence we read in Madame de Sévigné's letters descriptions of public events, to convey which a friend would at present have no more to do than write an address at a newspaper office. See for example her account of the death of Turenne, and the particulars given of the funeral procession to Saint Denis: an event which at the present day (we talk not of style) would be done for all the world at a penny a line. At the same time the circumstances in which they were written give these charming

compositions a serious historical importance, and hence those researches, in relation to them, which have conferred upon the names of Monmerqué and Walckenaer so much honour.

Madame de Sévigné was religious, and in the best sense of the word, for she was charitable, forgiving, and tolerant.

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• Have no enemies,' is one of her most energetically expressed councils to her daughter, to which she adds, and plenty of friends.' Such was the maxim of her mature years, but in her youth she practised it from feeling. We know of nothing more touching than her conduct upon arrival in town after the death of her husband, who fell in a duel that had originated in dispute about a mistress. To that mistress, Madame Godoran, the young bereaved wife sent to beg a lock of the hair of her husband, whose sins against herself she forgave, as she prayed Heaven to forgive them. Her pardon of the outrage against herself committed by her cousin Bussy Rabutin (he introduced her portrait in an indecent book), was in a similar spirit. She reserved it until he was abandoned by all the world, a ruined man: and then she visited him, affording him the consolation of her matchless conversation, with all the aid he stood in need of.

Thus lively, hearty, and wise, religious and tolerant, instructive and unaffected, natural and loving, with a reflecting mind, an expansive heart, accomplished manners, and boundless animal spirits, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal Marchioness de Sévigné was the most perfect woman of whom we have an unconscious selfrecord. Molière did good, but from mixed motives. His fine common sense revolted, no doubt, against the affectation which his satire demolished-but he acted, too, in obedience to the will of a monarch whose disdain was all egotistical. Madame de Sévigné did better: she instructed by presenting a model which won all hearts, in the contemplation of which people rather forgot than hated, and insensibly abandoned the tawdry idols to which they had before paid homage. For this reason, teaching by example is the best teaching; and sight of the good far better than exposure of the bad. Let those however who are dull, or sad, or oppressed, or disappointed, or dissatisfied with the world, have recourse to either one or the other. If Molière or Sévigné cannot administer relief, the case is all but hopeless.

With Madame de Sévigné closes that brilliant train of intellectual women of whom Madame de Rambouillet was the first.