Lettres choisies by Roger Duchêne (review)

After the bafflingly brief and eccentric selection of Mme de Sévigné's letters by Roger Duchêne that appeared in the Folio collection in 1988, this welcome new edition by Nathalie Freidel contains a much wider selection and is accompanied by full and useful notes, a chronology, and a biographical list of Sévigné's correspondents, friends, and acquaintances. The regrettable lack of an index means that scholars are more likely to make use of Duchêne's three-volume Pléiade edition of the complete correspondence (Paris: Gallimard, 1973–78), which does contain a full and useful index; but Freidel has arranged her choice of letters in a helpful manner, grouping letters chronologically under thematic headings such as 'Querelles galantes', 'La Relation du procès Fouquet', 'Répression de la révolte bretonne', 'Mort de La Rochefoucauld', and 'Lectures'. Inevitably, readers who already know their Sévigné will be disappointed not to find all their favourite letters in this collection. Especially given the fact that Freidel in her Preface hails Sévigné as a 'virtuose' of the epistolary art (p. 7), it is sad that she chose not to include any correspondence from either 1669 or 1670, as the wonderful set-piece letter to Coulanges from December 1670, informing him of La Grande Mademoiselle's forthcoming marriage to Lauzun ('Je m'en vais vous mander la chose la plus étonnante, la plus surprenante, la plus merveilleuse …'), is omitted. Moreover, none of the final, poignant letters from 1696, the year of Sévigné's death, are reproduced. These disappointments aside, this edition (together with the editor's intelligent and subtle twenty-five-page Preface) easily supplants the edition by Bernard Raffalli (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1976) as the best available paperback selection of Sévigné's correspondence. Freidel sums up well the joys of discovering Sévigné's 'monde en soi', because, for all the names and places that may be unknown to us, 'la surprise et le plaisir seront d'autant plus grands de nous trouver soudain en terrain connu, interpellés par une voix familière, émus par des retrouvailles imprévues, entraînés par le rire contagieux de la marquise' (p. 32).