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She had neither time nor disposition to give attention to such things, and when told that some one had done her an injustice, she replied that she did not wish to hear about it." "She led him a life a little hard," said Mme. de Graffigny, after her quarrel; but he seems to have found it agreeable, and broke his heart for a short time when she died.
Mme. de Graffigny Baron d'Holbach Mme. d'Epinay's Portrait of Herself Mlle. Quinault Rousseau La Chevrette Grimm Diderot The Abbe Galiani Estimate of Mme. d'Epinay A few of the more radical and earnest of the philosophers rarely, if ever, appeared at the table of Mme. Geoffrin. They would have brought too much heat to this company, which discussed everything in a light and agreeable fashion.
But the vivid, humane, and inspiring pages of Emile were not published until ten years after Turgot's letter to Madame de Graffigny: a circumstance which may teach us that in moral as in physical discoveries, though one man may take the final step and reap the fame, the conditions have been prepared beforehand.
According to Crebillon, the Man with the Iron Mask was nothing but an idle tale, and he had been assured of it by Louis XIV. himself. On the day of my first meeting with Crebillon at Silvia's, 'Cenie', a play by Madame de Graffigny, was performed at the Italian Theatre, and I went away early in order to get a good seat in the pit.
According to Crebillon, the Man with the Iron Mask was nothing but an idle tale, and he had been assured of it by Louis XIV. himself. On the day of my first meeting with Crebillon at Silvia's, 'Cenie', a play by Madame de Graffigny, was performed at the Italian Theatre, and I went away early in order to get a good seat in the pit.
She has been clearly but by no means pleasantly painted for us in the familiar letters of Mme. de Graffigny, in the rather malicious sketches of the Marquise de Crequi, and in the still more strongly outlined portrait or Mme. du Deffand, as a veritable bas bleu, learned, pedantic, eccentric, and without grace or beauty.
Helvetius, Mme. de Marchais, or Mme. de Graffigny, in the Encyclopedist coterie of Mlle. de Lespinasse, or in the liberal drawing room of Mme. d'Epinay, who held a more questionable place in the social world, but received much good company, Mme. Geoffrin herself included. Mme. de Graffigny is known mainly as a woman of letters whose life had in it many elements of tragedy.
Madame worked with so much care to seem what she was not, that no one knew exactly what she was; even her defects were not natural." "She talks like an angel" "she sings divinely" "our sex ought to erect altars to her," wrote Mme. de Graffigny during a visit at her chateau. A few weeks later her tone changed. They had quarreled. Of such stuff is history made.
Turgot's early passion for literature had made him seize an occasion of being introduced to even so moderately renowned a professor of it as Madame de Graffigny. He happened to be intimate with her niece, who afterwards became the lively and witty wife of Helvétius, somewhat to the surprise of Turgot's friends.
De Graffigny wittily said that it "escaped from the hands of Nature when there had entered into its composition only air and fire." They certainly were not faultless; indeed, some of them were very faulty. Nor were they, as a rule, remarkable for learning. Even the leaders of noted literary salons often lacked the common essentials of a modern education.
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