beginning of this, four superb cedars were planted, each one in the centre of the four parterres nearest the château. But there are the broad alleys and the veritable orange-trees just as they were when the charming châtelaine wrote to her daughter Madame de Grignan, with playful pride, "The garden of your forefathers has become so beautiful, so well planted, so very much in the fashion, so full of orange-flowers, that you would hardly recognize it. We are entirely surrounded by orange- and jasmineblossoms, and we are so perfumed by them in the evening that I might readily believe myself in Provence."

At the end of this fine garden is an open space, that Madame de Sévigné called Place Coulanges. She liked to give names to her trees, walks, and spaces. There is the fine park gate, "belle grille, dont les cinq ouvertures conduisent au parc." The wall forms a hemicycle and creates the famous "Echo." We stood on the stones that mark the precise spots, and listened to what Madame de Sévigné tells us "is a little blabber of words in the very ears." Beyond this gate extends the famous park in which Madame de Sévigné passed so much of her time. She went there to think, to meditate, to grieve, to pray, to escape importunate visitors, to talk to her friends, to hear confidences. She gave fanciful names to the walks: the "Solitary, the most beautiful of my alleys, so well planted;" the "Infinite," a winding path, the end of which could not be seen; the " Holy Horror," a dark sombre pathway; the "Cloister," where there were four long rows of trees; the "Mall," which she also called "My 'My Daughter's Humor;" "in it reign a silence, a tranquillity, a solitude, that would be difficult to find elsewhere."

Of course during these two hundred years many changes have been made inside and around the château; but its principal rooms remain as they were in the seventeenth century. There is the spacious dining-room where Madame de Sévigné entertained so elegantly her grand visitors the Duke and Duchess de Chaulnes, the governor of Brittany and

his wife, Madame de Rohan, and all Brittany, spending "four and five hundred pistoles in fricassees and dinners." Her state salon and bedroom are the same also. The celebrated portraits of herself, her family and friends, so often mentioned in her letters, hang on the walls of these rooms. During the terrible French Revolution of the last century Les Rochers suffered very little : these valuable portraits were taken out of their frames, rolled up, and hidden: thus they were saved. In the siege of Paris, in 1870, a portrait of Madame de Sévigné that was in the Hôtel Carnavalet, the Paris residence of Madame de Sévigné, was taken down and placed in the Hôtel-de-Ville for safety. On the 24th of May, 1871, the Hôtel-de-Ville was burned by the Commune and that portrait destroyed. Great sorrow was expressed, because it was supposed that it was the celebrated one by Mignard; but on inquiry it was discovered to have been only a copy. The original, with the famous original by the same artist of Madame de Grignan, and all other valuable portraits, had been taken to Les Rochers over a hundred years ago, and are there in safety. Madame de Sévigné is very grand, gay, triumphant even, in her Mignard portrait,-not handsome according to classic rules, but with a grace, a heart, a soul, in the expression of the charming face, that fully make amends for want of regularity of feature. The hair is dressed in what was called à la Grecque by Mignard; the beautiful bosom is very much exposed, and rich draperies fill up the canvas. Madame de Grignan's picture is a better one as a painting than her mother's; but the face, though handsome, is not so sympathetic. It is a portrait full of life, as Madame de Sévigné said of it," that head which stands out, that throat which breathes, that body which comes forward." The fine hands hold a branch of flowers in the lap. The draperies are rich and ample, all in the style of Mignard.

You are naturally eager to see the husband of Madame de Sévigné, of whom Bussy-Rabutin wrote, "Although he was intelligent, all the charms of

Marie could not hold him he loved everybody, and never loved any one so lovable as his wife." Luckily, this volatile husband lived only seven years; he was killed in 1651 in a duel with the Chevalier d'Albret, leaving a young widow with two children,-a son, the Marquis Charles de Sévigné, and a daughter, afterward wife of the governor of Provence, the Count de Grignan, also their handsome estates loaded down with debts. Expansive as Madame de Sévigné was in character, speech, and letters, she rarely let her husband's name fall from her lips or pen. She had little good to say of him, so she wisely held her peace. The charming young woman gave him the love, the faith, the grace, of the spring-time of her life, from eighteen to twenty-five. He destroyed all he could of these gifts, and when he was killed in a wanton quarrel on a question of false gallantry she seemed to bury with him even the remembrance of the unworthy Breton gentleman whom, as the father of her children, she was too true a woman to condemn aloud. Then she was grande dame, as well as a good woman. Noblesse oblige enables many a bitterlywronged man and woman to put on a fair front before the world. The portrait of the Marquis Henri de Sévigné represents just such a man as you might expect to see after hearing of his short, shameless life. He is handsome flesh and blood, without the appearance of the "esprit" Bussy-Rabutin attributes to him, a full, red-lipped face, with pleasure-loving eyes, and voluptuousness, selfish sensuality, expressed in every feature. Near by is the portrait of his son, the Marquis Charles,-a brave man on the field of battle, but up to the period of his marriage thriftless, dissipated, and weak. Ninon de l'Enclos, that famous "enslaver of men," who has the credit of ruining father and son, said contemptuously and coarsely of Charles de Sévigné, "He has a soul of pap, a body of wet paper; a veritable pumpkin fricasseed in snow." The portrait of Les Rochers gives him a weak, good-looking face, with silly eyes, but the face is not

so boldly bad in expression as his father's. Some years ago there used to hang in the Hôtel Carnavalet at Paris a very interesting picture. I saw it four or five years ago, when I was breakfasting with the widow of the former owner of the old Paris home of Madame de Sévigné. It represented Charles de Sévigné and his sister when they were twelve and fourteen years of age. Madame de Grignan, a very pretty girl, is seated at a spinnet, accompanying her brother, who is playing with quite an air of importance on the violin. They have charming young faces, but even at that early age Françoise de Sévigné's face has more character and expression than her brother's. If the poor fellow did inherit the vicious tendencies of his father, he took from his admirable mother gay good humor and graceful, kind simplicity of

manners.

Madame de Sévigné, with all her force of character, which enabled her to act with such dignity and prudence when she was a young attractive widow and an unusually fascinating middle-aged woman,-indeed, with such ability and propriety all her life, was very weak in the management of her children. Though strong to herself, she was ruled by more than she ruled them. Thus, Madame de Grignan, though so touchingly adored by her indulgent mother, was always selfish, cold, haughty, unsympathizing. And Charles de Sévigné, though much more tender and loving to his mother, was never taught to restrain one single vice or egotism. Poor, dear woman! how touchingly she betrays her motherly weakness and tenderness! She listens, she tells us naïvely, "even to his naughty confessions, in order to have the right to put in here and there a word of God." "He accepts with sweetness, and admits all that is said to him," she says; "but you know the weakness of human nature. Thus, I put all into the hands of Providence, and reserve only to myself the consolation of never having done anything to reproach myself with." And again she writes, "As I was walking day before yesterday, I found your brother (le frater) at the end of the

ander VIII. (Ottoboni, 1689-91), and Innocent XII. (Pignatelli, 1691-1700). When the Duke de Chaulnes was sent to Rome in 1689, at the time of the death of Innocent XI. (Odescalchi, 1676-89), a pope who was not very agreeable to Louis XIV., Madame de Sévigné wrote, most curiously for a Catholic, "The king says that he has resolved to send him [the Duke de Chaulnes] to Rome, because he judges him as the only one capable of doing the greatest work in Europe, giving to the Church a chief who will govern the Church to the satisfaction of all the world, and France especially." How characteristic of the spirit of that day! Allah was Allah, but Louis Quatorze alone was his prophet, le Roi Soleil! | Louis le bien-servi!

Madame de Sévigné's bedroom is to the right of the dining-room,—a spacious, fine chamber. There is her large bed, with canopy and curtains of red silk damask, on which her grand friend the Duchess de Chaulnes threw herself so frankly and slept so soundly. "On Thursday, Madame de Chaulnes entered, saying that she could do no longer without seeing me, that all Brittany was weighing down her shoulders, and, in fine, she was half dead. Whereupon she threw herself on my bed, and in a moment, behold! she was asleep from pure fatigue. We sat down and talked all the time. At last she awakened, finding it very pleasant, and adoring the charming liberty of Les Rochers."' A droll scene ensued. Madame de Sévigné, with her friend and suite, took a walk in the woods. While the rest of the party played at mall, the châtelaine, with her charming tact, made the duchess tell about her life at Rome, also how she had married the duke,-two very agreeable topics, undoubtedly. Suddenly a violent shower poured down,-"une pluie traîtresse,” said Madame de Sévigné: they were "wet to the skin." Then follows one of her inimitable rapid word-etchings: "Nous voilà toutes à courir; on crie, on tombe, on glisse; enfin on arrive, on fait grand feu, on change de chemise, de jupe; je fournis

à tout; on se fait essuyer ses souliers, on pâme de rire. Voilà comme fut traitée la gouvernante de Bretagne dans The hosson propre gouvernement." pitable châtelaine gave her distinguished guest a "collation" after all this wetting and excitement, and they made merry over the accident. This "gouvernante de Bretagne" was not any more refined in her looks than her red-faced husband, if Saint-Simon's portrait of her is exact. He tells us in his "Mémoires" that "she looked like a soldier of the guard -a Swiss, indeed-dressed in woman's clothes: she had the tone, voice, and expressions of the common people."

Madame de Sévigné's dressing-boxes of red lacquered wood stand on the bureau of her bedroom, with brushes, powder- and patch-boxes of the same material, very gay and pretty. There are chairs covered with her needle-work. She says in one of her letters, "We work in the evening,

I at my two bands of tapestry." And again she mentions an altar-front she embroidered: "It seems that I am only ten years of age, and they have given me a little end of canvas to play with." She boasts playfully in a letter to her daughter of her neat way of working: "I never blacken my silk with my wools." Several portraits hang on the walls of the bedroom,-one of the popular novelist of that day, Madame de la Fayette, one of that gaillard and madman "le divin Pommenars," another of the Huguenot Princess de Tarente, the poor, proud widow of the Duke de la Tremouille, daughter of a petty German sovereign, aunt to the Princess Palatine, who was mother of the clever, bad Regent d'Orléans. The Princess de Tarente had a great deal of German pride, and also royal pretensions which matched as ill with her small means and neglected position as her assumption of youth did with her age. "She thinks she is still young," writes Madame de Sévigné, "to the very great contempt of her mirror, which tells her every day that with such a face she ought to lose even the memory of her youth." Poor old woman! A Protestant in France, at a period when such belief was at a