Beautiful, and, if not brilliantly beautiful, at least, brilliantly witty, Madame de Sevigne was virtuous--in that chief sense of feminine virtue--amid an almost universal empire of profligacy around her. Her social advantages were unsurpassed, and her social success was equal to her advantages. She had the woman courtier's supreme triumph in being once led out to dance by the king--her own junior by a dozen years--no vulgar king, remember, but the "great" Louis XIV. Her cynical cousin, himself a writer of power, who had been repulsed in dishonorable proffers of love by the young marchioness during the lifetime of her husband--we mean Count Bussy--says, in a scurrilous work of his, that Madame de Sevigne remarked, on returning to her seat after her dancing-bout with the king, that Louis possessed great qualities, and would certainly obscure the luster of all his predecessors. "I could not help laughing in her face," the ungallant cousin declared, "seeing what had produced this panegyric." Probably, indeed, the young woman was pleased. But, whatever may have been her faults or her follies, nothing can rob Madame de Sevigne of the glory that is hers, in having been strong enough in womanly and motherly honor to preserve, against many dazzling temptations, amid general bad example, and even under malignant aspersions, a chaste and spotless name. When it is added that, besides access to the royal court itself, this gifted woman enjoyed the familiar acquaintance of La Rochefoucauld--with other high-bred wits, less famous, not a few--enough will have been said to show that her position was such as to give her talent its best possible chance. The French history of the times of Louis XIV. is hinted in glimpses the most vivid and the most suggestive, throughout the whole series of the letters. We owe it to our readers (and to Madame de Sevigne no less) first of all to let them see a specimen of the affectionate adulation that this French woman of rank and of fashion, literally in almost every letter of hers, effuses on her daughter--a daughter who, by the way, seems very languidly to have responded to such demonstrations: THE ROCKS, Sunday, June 28, 1671.