Word: vign
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...Golden Gates" is being held at 46 Rue de Sévigné until...
...oise Chandernagor, 38, a French judge, has been more fortunate than most first novelists in the wealth of sources available for her imaginative reconstruction. She has drawn from the writings of two of France's great literary stylists and keenest chroniclers of the age, Mme. de Sévigné and the Due de Saint-Simon, as well as from the correspondence of the indefatigable Mme. de Maintenon, who left behind 80 volumes of let ters at her death in 1719. Rendered in an unobtrusive translation by Barbara Bray, The King's Way recounts in an elegant pastiche...
Dian Fossey ∙ Madame de Sévign...
...vigné 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...