Word: rabutin
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...True friendship is never serene." Thus wrote Marie de Rabutin-Chantal--whoever she is--in 1671. Friendship is the rough average between a courtroom trial and a self-affirmation tape, the middle ground between the disinterested search of truth and maternal caring. that middle ground is full of heated arguments that get really personal. Friendship is that place where it is painful to tell the truth and hear the truth, but where you also know that the truth is the best thing for everybody involved. Friends point out each other's hypocrisies and get past the resentment that comes...
These testimonials notwithstanding, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696), remains lamentably little known in America. There is still no fullscale, modern biography in English and no satisfactory selection of her more than a thousand collected letters. Frances Mossiker's Madame de Sévigné: A Life and Letters fills neither gap, but it does provide an intriguing look at fragments of the great lady's correspondence...
Louis XIV ruled an empire on which the sun quickly set, but its literary lights -Corneille, Racine, Pascal, La Fontaine-still glow. Among them was Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné, whom generations of critics have crowned "the queen of letter writers." In this selection of 272 out of many hundreds of De Sévigné letters, the diadem seems to have its fair share of paste jewels, but it is worn with a regal flourish and idiosyncratic authority...
...went to the St. Goar Library, and, thinking a little light reading might enable me to get through the Sabbath without the help of the druggist, I requested (in writing) a certain youthful page to bring me Swinburne's youthful poems, or Bussy-Rabutin, or Severin's Premiere nuit de noces...
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