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Updated: June 18, 2025
She died of that unsuspected passion, and years afterwards these letters found the light and told the tale. The contrast between the two women so closely linked together is complete. Mme. du Deffand belonged to the age of Voltaire by every fiber of her hard and cynical nature. What she called love was a fire of the intellect which consumed without warming.
Their vivacity, intelligence, and tact, I may add also their good-nature, were a veil to cover up all eccentricities. It was when Madame du Deffand was eighty, and blind, that Horace Walpole pronounced her to be the most interesting woman in France.
Rank and fortune were important items, not quite indispensable, however; for Mme du Deffand was poor, and Mme Geoffrin was the wife of a manufacturer. In the salons of these two women edicts were framed, and academicians reared; but the questions discussed there were not nearly of the importance of those to which Mme de Staël's salon gave rise.
She was passionate, sensitive, and sympathetic, in a cold, heartless, and unfeeling world. She needed variety; being bored with society, solitude, husband, lovers, herself, nothing remained for her but to await deliverance by death." This came to her in 1780. In matters literary, Mme. du Deffand preserved an absolute liberty and independence of opinion.
Occasionally there is the tone of passion, as in the letters of Mlle. Aisse and Mlle. de Lespinasse, but this is rare. Even passion has grown sophisticated and deals with phrases. There is more or less artificiality in the exchange of written thoughts. Mme. du Deffand thinks while she writes, and what she sees takes always the color of her own intelligence.
Many courses were open to him, but the one he took was probably the most cruel that he could have taken: he insisted with an absolute rigidity on their correspondence being conducted in the tone of the most ordinary friendship on those terms alone, he said, would he consent to continue it. And of course such terms were impossible to Madame du Deffand.
Mme. du Deffand was one of the few women of the eighteenth century who saw reality and nothing but reality, and admitted what she saw; she was gifted with such quick penetration and such mental facility that she stands out prominently as one of the brightest and most intellectual of the spiritual women of her time.
About the middle of the century the Duchesse du Maine died, and Madame du Deffand established herself in Paris at the Convent of Saint Joseph in a set of rooms which still showed traces in the emblazoned arms over the great mantelpiece of the occupation of Madame de Montespan.
The profligate Madame du Deffand, who occupies so conspicuous a place in the annals of the French court in the days of its greatest corruption, has little sympathy with a situation of this kind, and is led to exclaim: Le fade personnage que votre Pétrarque! que sa Laure était sotte et précieuse!
I first began to interest myself for Madam du Deffand, whom the loss of her eyes made an object of commiseration in mine; but her manner of living so contrary to my own, that her hour of going to bed was almost mine for rising; her unbounded passion for low wit, the importance she gave to every kind of printed trash, either complimentary or abusive, the despotism and transports of her oracles, her excessive admiration or dislike of everything, which did not permit her to speak upon any subject without convulsions, her inconceivable prejudices, invincible obstinacy, and the enthusiasm of folly to which this carried her in her passionate judgments; all disgusted me and diminished the attention I wished to pay her.
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