The epistolary art, in which the art itself is nature, may be said to have reached perfection, with scarcely an historical development, in the letters of MME. DE SEVIGNE. The letters of Balzac are rhetorical exercises; those of Voiture are often, to use a word of Shakespeare, "heavy lightness, serious vanity." Mme. de Sevigne entered into the gains of a cultivated society, in which graceful converse had become a necessity of existence. She wrote delightfully, because she conveyed herself into her letters, and because she conversed freely and naturally by means of her pen. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, born in 1626, deprived of both parents in her earliest years, was carefully trained in literary studies--Latin, Italian, French--under the superintendence of her uncle, "le bien bon," the Abbe de Coulanges. Among her teachers were the scholar Menage and the poet Chapelain. Married at eighteen to an unworthy husband, the Marquis Henri de Sevigne, she was left at twenty-five a widow with two children, the daughter whom she loved with excess of devotion, and a son, who received from his mother a calmer affection. She saw the life of the court, she was acquainted with eminent writers, she frequented the Hotel de Rambouillet (retaining from it a touch of preciosity, "one superfluous ribbon," says Nisard, "in a simple and elegant toilet"), she knew and loved the country and its rural joys, she read with excellent judgment and eager delight the great books of past and present times. When her daughter, "the prettiest girl in France," was married in 1669 to M. de Grignan, soon to be Lieutenant-General of Provence, Mme. de Sevigne, desiring to be constantly one with her, at least in thought, transferred into letters her whole life from day to day, together with much of the social life of the time during a period of nearly thirty years. She allowed her pen to trot, throwing the reins, as she says, upon its neck; but if her letters are improvisations, they are improvisations regulated by an exquisite artistic instinct. Her imagination is alert in discovering, combining, and presenting the happiest meanings of reality. She is gay, witty, ironical, malicious, and all this without a trace of malignity; amiable rather than passionate, except in the ardour of her maternal devotion, which sometimes proved oppressive to a daughter who, though not unloving, loved with a temperate heart; faithful to friends, loyal to those who had fallen into misfortune, but neither sentimental nor romantic, nor disposed to the generosities of a universal humanity; a woman of spirit, energy, and good sense; capable of serious reflection, though not of profound thought; endowed with an exquisite sense of the power of words, and, indeed, the creator of a literary style. While her interests were in the main of a mundane kind, she was in sympathy with Port-Royal, admired the writings of Pascal, and deeply reverenced Nicole.