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I recommend that book instead. Frances Mossiker's book is really the best source for the Madame's letters, as it offers information about people and the era and much of the original letters.
Disappointing after The Duc de Saint-Simon's Memoires. This is a short edition which gives a sample of the many letters mostly to her daughter. My guess is the letters are spendid in French for their grace and nuiance. (See my review). They are to my understanding monuments to French epistulary art. In translation I found them mostly uninteresting gossip with a few revealing events, constant inquiries after her daughter's health and complaints of her son's waywardness, and the common maternal whinning to a daughter of why don't you call more often.
To view history from her perspective is incredibly entertaining. He admits that selecting which of Madame's 1400+ extant letters would appear in his book was extremely difficult, however I would have prefered to have been able to make those editing decisions myself. Thank God for Madame de Sevigne. The only flaw here - Tancock's collection of Sevigne's letters is incomplete, and we are at his mercy regarding content. I will next be looking for a complete collection of Madame's letters to sift through. Her letters are sublime. Her voluminous correspondence provides exquisit insight to life in the court of Louis XIV, complete with hilarious asides and fastidious detail.
I shall never buy from these liars again. would be horrified. C'est la guerre. The letters are fascinating and the book is a jewel, but the cover was tatty, with felt pen crudely obliterating prices on old stickers,etc., pages foxed and dog eared, much text moronically underlined with ball-point. Madame S.
This Penguin Classics edition by the great Leonard Tancock features wonderful translations but could have done with a few more explanatory notes. She was a fixture at court, the companion of la Rochefoucauld and Madame La Fayette, saw the plays of Racine and Corneille, and heard the music of Lully. You can read about the trial of Foucquet, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and witness the terrible death of the odious Marquise de Brinvilliers. The letters of the divine Marie have been celebrated for more than three centuries, from her time to ours. And it should have been longer. There is an immediacy and sensitivity to her writing that establishes a bond with the reader as palpable today as it was in the 17th century. It is impossible not to be drawn in to the lost world of le Roi Soleil when you have such a charming companion as your guide. The Marquise knew everyone and saw practically everything of note in the France of her time, or knew somebody who had seen it.
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