100 Francs Madame de Sévigné

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, was chosen for this issue as part of France's ongoing series celebrating figures from French cultural history. Her reputation rests almost entirely on her letters — roughly 1,100 survive — written primarily to her daughter and circulated among the aristocracy during Louis XIV's reign. They were never intended for publication, which is precisely what makes them so useful to historians: unguarded observations on court life, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the poisoning scandals of the 1670s that implicated several figures close to Versailles.