A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Sevigne, Marie de Rubutin Chantal, Marchioness of
SEVIGNE, MARIE DE RUBUTIN CHANTAL, MARCHIONESS OF,
Daughter of the Baron de Chantal, was born, in 1627, at Bourbilly, in Burgundy, and was early left an orphan. Her maternal uncle, Christopher de Coulanges, brought her up, and she was taught by Menage and Chapelain. At the age of eighteen she married the Marquis de Sévigné, who was killed in a duel seven years afterwards. Left with a son and daughter, she devoted herself entirely to their education. To her daughter, who, in 1669, married the Count de Grignan, governor of Provence, she was particularly attached; and to her was addressed the greater part of those letters which have placed the Marchioness de Sévigné in the first rank of epistolary writers. This illustrious lady was acquainted with all the wits and learned men of her time; and she is said to have decided the famous dispute between Perrault and Boileau, concerning the preference of the ancients to the moderns, saying, "the ancients are the finest, and we are the prettiest."
"Her letters," says Voltaire, "filled with anecdotes, written with freedom, and in a natural and animated style, are an excellent criticism upon studied letters of wit; and still more upon those fictitious letters, which aim to Imitate the epistolary style, by a recital of false sentiments and feigned adventures to imaginary correspondents." She died in 1698, in her seventy-first year, at her daughter's residence in Provence, of a fever brought on in consequence of the anxiety she bad endured during a dangerous illness of Madame de Grignan.