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Updated: June 17, 2025
But my library is not particularly rich in those books which illustrate the literary history of his times. I have Rousseau, and Marmontel's Memoirs, and Madame du Deffand's Letters, and perhaps a few other works which would be of use. But Grimm's Correspondence, and several other volumes of memoirs and letters, would be necessary.
Marie Antoinette to Maria Theresa, July 17th, Arneth, ii., p. 8. "Histoire de Marie Antoinette," par M. de Goncourt, p. 50. Quoting an unpublished journal by M.M. Hardy, in the Royal Library. It is the name by which she is more than once described in Madame du Deffand's letters. See her "Correspondence," ii., p. 357. Mercy to Maria Teresa, December 11th, 1773, Arneth, ii., p. 81.
Gallantry and beauty were found in the Maréchale de Luxembourg and the Comtesse de Boufflers. The philosophical movement of the Encyclopædists and Economists was not encouraged at all. Thus, in Mme. du Deffand's salon, we find neither pure philosophy nor religion, nor the air of pedants and déclamateurs; it was a royalist salon without illusion, hence indifferent to all questions.
As previously stated, she was the only female admitted to the dinners given by Mme. Geoffrin to her men of letters. Mme. du Deffand's friend, le Président Hénault, left the following portrait of Mlle. de Lespinasse: "You are cosmopolitan—you are suitable to all occasions. You like company—you like solitude. Pleasures amuse, but do not seduce you.
It is this final period of Madame du Deffand's life that is reflected so minutely in the famous correspondence which the labours of Mrs. Toynbee have now presented to us for the first time in its entirety. Her letters to Walpole form in effect a continuous journal covering the space of fifteen years (1766-1780). They allow us, on the one hand, to trace through all its developments the progress of an extraordinary passion, and on the other to examine, as it were under the microscope of perhaps the bitterest perspicacity on record, the last phase of a doomed society. For the circle which came together in her drawing-room during those years had the hand of death upon it. The future lay elsewhere; it was simply the past that survived there in the rich trappings of fashion and wit and elaborate gaiety but still irrevocably the past. The radiant creatures of Sceaux had fallen into the yellow leaf. We see them in these letters, a collection of elderly persons trying hard to amuse themselves, and not succeeding very well. Pont-de-Veyle, the youthful septuagenarian, did perhaps succeed; for he never noticed what a bore he was becoming with his perpetual cough, and continued to go the rounds with indefatigable animation, until one day his cough was heard no more. Hénault once notorious for his dinner-parties, and for having written an historical treatise which, it is true, was worthless, but he had written it Hénault was beginning to dodder, and Voltaire, grinning in Ferney, had already dubbed him 'notre délabré Président. Various dowagers were engaged upon various vanities. The Marquise de Boufflers was gambling herself to ruin; the Comtesse de Boufflers was wringing out the last drops of her reputation as the mistress of a Royal Prince; the Maréchale de Mirepoix was involved in shady politics; the Maréchale de Luxembourg was obliterating a highly dubious past by a scrupulous attention to 'bon ton, of which, at last, she became the arbitress: 'Quel ton! Quel effroyable ton! she is said to have exclaimed after a shuddering glance at the Bible; 'ah, Madame, quel dommage que le Saint Esprit eût aussi peu de goût! Then there was the floating company of foreign diplomats, some of whom were invariably to be found at Madame du Deffand's: Caraccioli, for instance, the Neapolitan Ambassador 'je perds les trois quarts de ce qu'il dit, she wrote, 'mais comme il en dit beaucoup, on peut supporter cette perte'; and Bernstorff, the Danish envoy, who became the fashion, was lauded to the skies for his wit and fine manners, until, says the malicious lady,
Her mother, the Comtesse d'Albon, could not acknowledge this fugitive and nameless daughter, but after the death of her husband she received her on an inferior footing, had her carefully educated, and secretly gave her love and care. Left alone and without resources at fifteen, Julie was taken, as governess and companion, into the family of a sister who was the wife of Mme. du Deffand's brother.
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