Correspondance de Madame de Graffigny. Tome 15 (1 January 1756–10 November 1759). Lettres 2304–2518 by D. W. Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Correspondance de Madame de Graffigny. Tome 15 (1 January 1756–10 November 1759). Lettres 2304–2518 by D. W. Smith Joan DeJean Correspondance de Madame de Graffigny. Tome 15 (1 January 1756–10 November 1759). Lettres 2304–2518. Prepared by D. W. Smith. With the collaboration of Dorothy P. Arthur, J. A. Dainard, E. A. Heinemann, Marie-Thérèse Inguenaud, L. C. Kerslake, Marie-Paule Powell, and Diane Beelen Woody. Directors of the edition: J. A. Dainard, English Showalter. ISBN 978-0-7294-0969-8. xliii + 465pp. Hb. 20 ill. Oxford, U.K.: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2016. The publication of the final installment of Françoise de Graffigny’s correspondence means that readers who have followed the unfolding of her life volume by volume will now eavesdrop for the last time on a crisis in one of her relationships and read about the final card game or dinner among friends. We’ll no longer have a bird’s eye view of evenings at the theater—or of the censorship of classic Enlightenment works. Fifteen volumes, the first of which appeared in 1985, have been published by the Voltaire Foundation. They contain just over 2,500 letters, covering the final forty-two years of Graffigny’s life—whereas the Pléiade edition of the correspondence from the last thirty-eight years of Sévigné’s existence includes not quite 1,400 letters. Throughout, the Graffigny Project’s editorial team has maintained the highest standards and has done a remarkable job of making the letters accessible. Their notes have been consistently [End Page 306] lucid, never intrusive, and always packed with essential information. All important authors deserve such impeccable scholarly treatment. As I think back over the concluding volume of Graffigny’s letters, three things stand out. First, even though the volume covers the years 1756 to 1758 and thus a time when serious illness was causing her growing pain and increasingly limiting her movement, Graffigny’s passion for the world of writers and publishing never flagged: she remained to the end a carefully-informed observer of “the business of Enlightenment.” In January 1756, for example, Graffigny was reading volume 5 of the Encyclopédie, newly published in November 1755. On the 13th of that month, she was ill, but Diderot’s article “Encyclopédie” was read to her; she pronounced it “admirable.” By January 22, she was reading “Esclavage.” A second passion remained similarly intact: for the Parisian theatrical scene. Graffigny’s remark on May 18, 1757—“voila trois jours de suitte que je vais a la Comedie” [sic]—is in fact hardly surprising. Sometimes, she even took in two plays in the same day. She knew the most celebrated actors well; she and her friends had insider information on every new play and playwright. And last but hardly least, the ultimate volume of Graffigny’s correspondence paints a remarkably vivid picture of friendship. I don’t know when I’ve read a text that conveys a more powerful sense of friendship—not in the form of a mini-treatise or any attempt to explain the phenomenon, but instead though a particularly vivid illustration of the functioning of a closely-knit circle of friends. Despite the fact that many members of Graffigny’s network had families of their own, they all found time for each other. They saw each other on a regular basis, in many cases every day: they dined at each other’s tables; they played cards together; they went to the theater or took carriage rides together. And above all they talked and talked—and they wrote letters. Graffigny’s correspondence gives the impression that 18th-century Paris was a golden age for friendship. As a result, before her health started to fail, Graffigny’s daily life seems often to have been a veritable whirl. On July 7, 1757, she leads off a letter to François Antoine Devaux, her closest friend for decades of her life: “C’est pour te dire seulement que je ne suis pas morte, mon ami, bien que je dusse l’estre par la vie que je mene. Je dine tous les jours dehors. Je vais aux spectacle...