“Sévigné would not have said it better!” Trafficking in letters, trafficking in lives

The allusion to Madame de Sévigné’s letters leads Proust toward a discursive enterprise that strongly resembles a trafficking that is, if not illicit, then at least shady. Like any fetish, the incongruous “Dostoevsky side of Mme de Sévigné” is haunting: obsessive, obscure, and blinding. The fascinating shadow play of the revenance and the “transvertebration” of maternal bodies is played out on this figure from beyond the grave, embodied by a correspondence transmitted from generation to generation.