The question has been asked, "In what does madame de Sévigné's merit consist? Did she show herself above her age?" La Harpe says, in his panegyric, "Even those who love this extraordinary woman do not sufficiently estimate the superiority of her understanding. I find in her every species of talent: argumentative or frivolous, witty or sublime, she adopts every tone with wonderful facility." To the question, however, of whether she was superior to her age, we answer, at once, no; but she was equal to the best and highest portion of it. We pass in review before us the greatest men of that day--the most profound thinkers, the most virtuous,--Pascal, Rochefoucauld, Racine, Boileau. Her opinions and sentiments were as liberal and enlightened as theirs; and that is surely sufficient praise for a woman absolutely without pretensions; and who, while she bares the innermost depths of her mind to her daughter, had no thought of dressing and educating that mind for posterity.
The race of madame de Sévigné is extinct. Her son continued childless. The marquis de Grignan died also without offspring. He died young, of the small-pox; and his broken-hearted mother soon followed him to the tomb. Pauline, marquise de Simiane, left children, who became allied to the family of Créqui; but that, also, is now extinct.
[Footnote 61: Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy, was one of those unfortunate men who, from some malconformity in the structure of their minds, inherit infamy from the use they make of their talents. His youth was spent in gambling, dissipation, duels, and all the disorders of a disorderly period. He was in the army during his early years, and became attached to the great Condé. He served under him when that prince blockaded Paris, and was one of the faction of young men of quality who attempted to govern the court on its return, and who received the name of _Petits-Maîtres_ from the witty Parisians, a name afterwards preserved to designate young coxcombs of fashion in almost all countries. When Condé was arrested, he made war against the king in Berri. When liberated, he abandoned him. Insolent and presumptuous, he made an enemy of this great man as well as of Turenne. Bussy attacked the latter in a dull epigram. Turenne's reply was far more witty: he wrote to the king, that "Bussy was the best officer, for songs, that he had in his troop." In like manner, he at first paid his court to Fouquet, and afterwards caballed against him. He had frequently been imprisoned in the Bastille. In 1569 he was exiled. He amused himself during his banishment by writing his "Amours des Gaules," a scandalous history of the time, whose wit cannot redeem the infamy attached to his becoming the betrayer and chronicler of the faults and misfortunes of his friends. Allowed to return to court, he entered into a cabal for the ruin of the duchesse de la Vallière--his own was the consequence. Deprived of his employment, imprisoned in the Bastille, and afterwards exiled, he drank deep of the cup of disappointment and mortification. He continued his work in his retreat; but the exercise of malice and calumny did not compensate for being driven from the arena on which he delighted to figure. Sixteen years after, wards he was allowed to return to court; but it had then lost its charms, especially as the king did not regard him with an eye of favour, so he returned once again to his country retreat. He died in 1693, aged seventy-one. Ill brought up and uneducated, wit, sharpened by malice, was his chief talent. He wrote a pure style, but his letters are stiff and dull; and his chief work is remarkable for its license and malice rather than for talent.]