‘French Life’

357This series of three articles was begun as part of a much larger project. In February 1862 EG told W. S. Williams, of Smith, Elder & Co. that she was contemplating a series of articles for All the Year Round, ‘pictures of French Society in Paris and the provinces in the 19^th century’. ¹ ‘I think what gave me the start was the meeting with a supposed-to-be well-educated young lady who knew nothing about Madame de Sévigné, who had been like a well-known friend to me all my life’, she added parenthetically (Letters, p.675). Once underway she hesitated in sending the articles to the weekly, ‘to be broken up into bits’, unless there was a possibility of a book-length publication at the end. She pressed on with the subject in March, reassuring herself that there was no overlap with Julia Kavanagh’s recent French Women of Letters (1862): ‘I think I know … what period it embraces, the 18^th century, while mine is the 19^th’. ‘My book is rather Memoirs elucidatory of the Life and Times of Madame de Sévigné’, she told George Smith, sketching out some headings for chapters, and indicating that she had a first chapter drafted (Letters, p. 679). The project on Madame de Sévigné, the prototype woman intellectual and letter writer of the ancien régime, was close to her heart. A possible model may have been her friend Mary Mohl’s recent book, Madame Récamier: with a Sketch of the History of Society in France (1862).