A woman of letters, celebrated in her time as a woman of wit and learning but not as an exceptional letter writer, it was in her correspondence with her daughter that Madame de Sevigne provided the model of an involuntary work: the important thing for her was that her letters reach her daughter two or even three times a week.

Born in Paris to a Bourguignon gentleman and a financier's daughter, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, orphaned at the age of seven, was raised in the Marais within the de Coulanges family, which provided her with a modern education based on conversation and reading. Married at the age of eighteen to Henri de Sevigne, a fickle man always ready to draw his sword, who gave her two children - Marie-Francoise and Charles - and land in Brittany, Madame de Sevigne found herself a widow at twenty-five following her husband's death in a duel.

With a gift for society life, she ruled at the court of Fouquet and in salons such as that of Madame de La Fayette, dividing her time between the Hotel Carnavalet, where she lived in Paris and her Chateau des Rochersin Brittany. In 1669 she gave her daughter, "the prettiest girl in France", in marriage to the Count of Grignan. On 6 February 1671, when the Marchioness wrote to her daughter, who had gone to join her husband, appointed Lieutenant-General in Provence by Louis XIV, she had just turned forty-five. This letter was the first of a series which continued until her death twenty-five years later.