In 1636, the Abbé de Coulanges was invested with the guardianship of a little orphan, his niece, Marie de Chantai: the child was ten years old; the tutor twenty-nine. For fifty years he watched over the person and the property of his ward with an entirely paternal solicitude, gave her very wise masters, like Ménage and Chapelain, occupied himself with her establishment and, when she became a widow, wisely administered her fortune. But everything was said by Madame de Sévigné herself, when the "very good" died: "There is nothing good that he did not do for me, either in giving me his own property entirely, or in preserving and reestablishing that of my children. He drew me from the abyss in which I was at the death of M. de Sévigné, he won lawsuits, he restored all my properties to good condition, he paid our debts, he made the estate which my son inhabits the most handsome and agreeable in the world, he married off my children; in a word I owe peace and repose in life to his continuous cares..." And she adds this reflection so tenderly true and so sadly human: "The loss that we feel when the old die is often considerable when we have great reasons for loving them and when we have always seen them." (September 2, 1687.) Madame de Sévigné had passed her youth at Livry near this worthy man. After the death of her husband she stayed there from choice. She lived happily there with her daughter, and the latter even returned there several times after her marriage. These memories rendered Livry still more dear to Madame de Sévigné, who, on an April day, after having heard the nightingales and contemplated the budding greenery of the park, wrote to Madame de Grignan: "It is very difficult for me to revisit this place, this garden, these alleys, this little bridge, this avenue, this meadow, this mill, this little view, this forest, without thinking of my very dear child." (April 22, 1672.) In the summer, when they put her little daughter in her care, she took her to Livry: "Presently I am going to Livry; I will take with me my little child and her nurse and all the little household...." (May 27, 1672.) She loved to receive her son at Livry. She went to Livry to care for her maladies and to follow her treatments. She also went there to pay her devotions in Holy Week: "I have made of this house a little Trappe.... I have found pleasure in the sadness which I have had here: a great solitude, a great silence, a sad office, Tenebræ intoned with devotion (I had never been at Livry in Holy Week), a canonical fast and a beauty in these gardens with which you would be charmed, all these have pleased me." (March 24, 1671.) It was her favorite place for writing, and she said that her mind and her body were there in peace. And, truly, almost all the letters which she wrote from Livry breathed joy and health.