Word: vigne
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Virginia Woolf celebrated Mme. de Sévigné in a lyrical essay: "This great lady, this robust and fertile letter writer, who in our age would probably have been one of the great novelists ..." Thornton Wilder sketched an invidious portrait of the 17th century French author in The Bridge of San Luis Rey; the poet Alphonse Lamartine called her the Petrarch of French prose; Proust compared her art to Dostoyevsky...
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...
...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...
...come shine." For a brief moment at Manhattan's St. Regis hotel, the '30s notion that hearts were made to be broken was revived. The spiritualist: former Liverpudlian Mabel Mercer, 73, who began singing 60 years ago and went on to become the Madame de Sévigné of the supper clubs. Seated in a Louis XV armchair, Mercer held the kind of wry musical conversation on affairs of the heart that has made a minor art form of ballad singing and influenced singers from Billie Holiday to Barbra Streisand. Aware that it is her phrasing...
...medieval shop signs, kitchen utensils, 3,000 keys, 700 padlocks, 600 door knockers, and more than 100 pairs of scissors, including one shaped like a pelican with the blades forming its beak. Coffee mills designed to grind the precious beans in the 17th century, when Madame de Sévigné purportedly scoffed that "Racine will pass-like coffee," bear little resemblance to the streamlined models sold in France today, but their shape is basically the same. A craftsman's implement bears the doughty motto: "I am Jacques' chisel. Let me lie. I'll work...