ABSTRACT
Madame de Sevigne (Marie de Rabutin-Chantal) was born in Paris in 1626, the daughter of Celse-Benigne de Rabutin-Chantal of old nobility from BurO gundy, and of Marie de Coulanges of a wealthy financial family. Her father died when she was one and her mother when she was seven. Little is known of her early years and of her education except that she was raised by the maO ternal bourgeois side of the family. However, she mastered Italian and her reading throughout her life was deep and diversified, ranging from novels and romances to works of religion and theology. Of her contemporaries, she read Corneille, Moliere, La Fontaine, and Pascal, to name but a few. At the age of eighteen, she was married to the Baron Henri de Sevigne of Breton nobility. They had two children: Fran^oise-Marguerite, born in Paris in 1646, and Charles, born in Brittany in 1648. In 1651, her husband, who was a spendO thrift and a philanderer, was killed in a duel over his mistress. A widow at the age of twenty-five, Sevigne was able to lead the life of her choice, thanks to her uncle, Abbe de Coulanges, le Bien Bon, who managed her financial reO sources wisely. She embraced her new status and never remarried, a signifiO cant choice at a time when most widowed women either remarried or entered a convent. In fact, about thirty years later, she wrote to her cousin Bussy: “The word widow connotes freedom , a n d again later in life, in 1687, she mentioned to the same the importance of the date of her widowhood: “I am going to forget the date of my birth, which saddens and overwhelms me, and I will choose instead that of my widowhood” (3: 300).
