Word: mme
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...advice of his lawyer--"The French adore love affairs...understand crimes of passion...I'll have you acquitted"--and starts out to find the killer himself. Accompanied by a secretary he had just fired, he decides to leave for Marseilles, hoping to dig up clues in the late Mme. Vercel's somewhat murky past...
...They reveal an astonishing life. A noblewoman of beauty and wealth, Mme. de Sévigné was widowed at 25, when her libertine husband died in a duel over a courtesan. A crush of suitors quickly moved in: Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's ill-fated superintendent of finance; Marshal de Turenne, the outstanding military hero of the era; Prince Armand de Bourbon, a member of the royal family. The widow refused them all. Her deepest affections were held in reserve for her daughter. The occasion for most of the Sévigné letters was the daughter...
Those letters were never intended for publication: they are sprightly, candid and occasionally risque. In one letter, she describes the consequences of a liaison between the King and a 17-year-old girl: "Mme. de Fontanges has been made a Duchess with a 20,000 ecus a year pension; she accepted congratulations yesterday, lying...
...Mme. de Sévigné even found cause for amusement when her son Charles confided that his various love affairs had been interrupted by about of impotence. "We laughed uproariously," she writes her daughter. "I told him that I was delighted that he had been punished for his sins at the precise point of origin." She could not resist communicating the dictum that was pronounced upon Charles by Ninon de 1'Enclos, the celebrated courtesan: "His soul is made of mush, his body of wet paper and his heart is like a pumpkin fricasseed in snow...
Mossiker has excerpted too many letters that dwell on Mme. de Sévigné's excessive love for her daughter. In translating the letters the author has frequently coarsened the elegant language of the original. She uses contemporary jargon and cliches-"peer group," "life-style," "role models"-to describe the world of 17th century aristocrats. "One of the great mistresses of the art of speech," as Virginia Woolf characterized Mme. de Sévigné, is said by Mossiker to have "verbalized as naturally as she breathed." Even so, the French writer's voice carries, resonating across...