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Updated: May 28, 2025
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.
Sincere, chaste, enthusiastic, and essentially religious, she remained so amidst all the corruption and physical and mental degeneracy of the age. Critics have made much ado over her marriage, a union of pure love and mutual inclinations, amidst the marriages of mere convenience and the gallant liaisons, such as those of Mme. du Deffand and le Président Hénault, and Mme. d'Epinay and Grimm.
Madeline Hénault has been described as the explorer's first wife, notwithstanding genealogical impossibilities which make the explorer's daughter thirty-six years old before he was seventeen. Even the infallible Tanguay trips on Radisson's genealogy. I have before me the complete record of the family taken from the parish registers of Three Rivers and Quebec, by the indefatigable Mr.
President Henault, Abbe Bon, the Archbishop of Toulouse, the Archbishop of Aix, Turgot, d'Alembert, Abbe de Boismont these are the men who have taught me to speak, to think, and who have deigned to count me for something."
It is very often more necessary to conceal contempt than resentment, the former forgiven, but the latter sometimes forgot. There is a small quarto book entitled, 'Histoire Chronologique de la France', lately published by Le President Henault, a man of parts and learning, with whom you will probably get acquainted at Paris.
Besides the Abbe de Bouffiers, by whom I was not beloved, and Madam de Bouffiers, in whose opinion I was guilty of that which neither women nor authors ever pardon, the other friends of Madam de Luxembourg never seemed much disposed to become mine, particularly the President Henault, who, enrolled amongst authors, was not exempt from their weaknesses; also Madam du Deffand, and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, both intimate with Voltaire and the friends of D'Alembert, with whom the latter at length lived, however upon an honorable footing, for it cannot be understood I mean otherwise.
Voltaire, d'Argental, Moncrif, Hénault, Madame d'Egmont, Madame du Deffand herself all were born within a few years of each other, and all lived to be well over eighty, with the full zest of their activities unimpaired. Pont-de-Veyle, it is true, died young at the age of seventy-seven.
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,
My enemies, a portion of whom are amongst yours, certainly succeed each other with frightful eagerness to try my wind. Now they have just published under my name some attacks on the poor president Henault, whom I love with sincere affection.
Sulte, whose explanation of the case is this: that Radisson's mother, Madeline Hénault, first married Sébastien Hayet, of St. Malo, to whom was born Marguerite about 1630; that her second husband was Pierre Esprit Radisson of Paris, to whom were born our hero and the sisters Françoise and Elizabeth.
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