Recueil des lettres de Madame la Marquise de Sévigné, à Madame la Comtesse de Grignan sa fille - Madame de Sévigné 1626-1696 (Paris Compagnie des libraires, 1763)
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (5 February 1626 – 17 April 1696), also widely known as Madame de Sévigné or Mme de Sévigné, was a French aristocrat, remembered for her letter-writing. By 1673, Mme de Sévigné's letters were being copied and circulated. Therefore, she knew that her letters were semi-public documents and crafted them accordingly. Most of her letters, celebrated for their wit and vividness, were addressed to her daughter, Françoise-Marguerite de Sévigné, comtesse de Grignan. She is revered in France as one of the great icons of French 17th-century literature.
Madame de Sévigné corresponded with her daughter for nearly thirty years. A clandestine edition, containing twenty-eight letters or portions of letters, was published in 1725, followed by two others the next year. Pauline de Simiane, Mme de Sévigné's granddaughter, decided to officially publish her grandmother's correspondence. Working with the editor Denis-Marius Perrin of Aix-en-Provence, she published 614 letters in 1734–1737, then 772 letters in 1754. The letters were selected according to Mme de Simiane's instructions: she rejected those that dealt too closely with family matters, or those that seemed poorly written. The remaining letters were often rewritten in accordance with the style of the day. This raises a question of the letters' authenticity.Of the 1,120 known letters, only 15 percent are signed, the others having been destroyed soon after they were read. However, in 1873, some early manuscript copies of the letters, directly based on Mme de Sévigné's originals, were found in an antique shop. These accounted for about half of the letters to Mme de Grignan.
Ex libris Graf Max O'Donell (manuscript)
Keywords: 17th Century (1601-1700); Correspondence; History; Biography; France