Books: Correspondent

MADAME DE SEVIGNE: A LIFE AND LETTERS by Frances Mossiker Knopf; 538 pages; $22.95

Virginia Woolf celebrated Mme. de Sévigné in a lyrical essay: "This great lady, this robust and fertile letter writer, who in our age would probably have been one of the great novelists ..." Thornton Wilder sketched an invidious portrait of the 17th century French author in The Bridge of San Luis Rey; the poet Alphonse Lamartine called her the Petrarch of French prose; Proust compared her art to Dostoyevsky's.

These testimonials notwithstanding, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696), remains lamentably little known in America. There is still no fullscale, modern biography in English and no satisfactory selection of her more than a thousand collected letters. Frances Mossiker's Madame de Sévigné: A Life and Letters fills neither gap, but it does provide an intriguing look at fragments of the great lady's correspondence.

" They reveal an astonishing life. A noblewoman of beauty and wealth, Mme. de Sévigné was widowed at 25, when her libertine husband died in a duel over a courtesan. A crush of suitors quickly moved in: Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's ill-fated superintendent of finance; Marshal de Turenne, the outstanding military hero of the era; Prince Armand de Bourbon, a member of the royal family. The widow refused them all. Her deepest affections were held in reserve for her daughter. The occasion for most of the Sévigné letters was the daughter's marriage and removal to Provence. Separated from the child she idolized, Mme. de Sévigné launched upon her reports of life at the resplendent court of the Sun King and of the society of Paris, where she reigned as a famous wit.

Those letters were never intended for publication: they are sprightly, candid and occasionally risque. In one letter, she describes the consequences of a liaison between the King and a 17-year-old girl: "Mme. de Fontanges has been made a Duchess with a 20,000 ecus a year pension; she accepted congratulations yesterday, lying on her bed."

Mme. de Sévigné even found cause for amusement when her son Charles confided that his various love affairs had been interrupted by about of impotence. "We laughed uproariously," she writes her daughter. "I told him that I was delighted that he had been punished for his sins at the precise point of origin." She could not resist communicating the dictum that was pronounced upon Charles by Ninon de 1'Enclos, the celebrated courtesan: "His soul is made of mush, his body of wet paper and his heart is like a pumpkin fricasseed in snow."

Formidably acute and full of zest for life, she found no event too humble for her observation: haymaking, a ramble in the woods, the delight of fresh Breton butter. At the same time she produced brilliant set pieces of aristocratic life: Fouquet's trial and imprisonment on dubious evidence; the suicide of the maitre d'hotel when fish ordered for the King's banquet failed to arrive; the execution of a marquise for mass murder.