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He had begun in England a correspondence with the Comtesse de Boufflers, he was made welcome too in the salons of Mme. Geoffrin and of Mile, de Lespinasse, and he soon became intimate with d'Alembert and Turgot. His reception was no less cordial at court, where the children of the Dauphin met him, prepared with polite little speeches about his works.
It is love itself that she gives us, love utterly unconscious of anything but itself, uncontaminated, unspoilt. She is Mlle. de Lespinasse rather than Marguerite Gautier; a creature in whom ardour is as simple as breath, and devotion a part of ardour. Her physical suffering is scarcely to be noticed; it is the suffering of her soul that Duse gives us.
Necker, Sunday and Thursday with Mme. d'Holbach, and have ample time to drop into other salons afterward, passing an hour or so, perhaps, before going to the theater, in the brilliant company that surrounded Mlle. de Lespinasse, and, very likely, supping elsewhere later.
Geoffrin allowed her three thousand francs. The majority of the members of her salon were from that of Mme. du Deffand, having followed Mlle. de Lespinasse after the rupture of the two women; besides these, there were Condorcet, Helvétius, Grimm, Marmontel, Condillac, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and many others.
One of the most interesting and informing things on the subject is his discourse on vinum acinaticium, a sort of Roman Imperial Tokay made from grapes kept till the frost had touched them. Genuine letters of Sappho would have been of the first interest to compare with those of Heloise, and the "Portuguese Nun" and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.
Lespinasse, which divided her salon and left her quite alone with her faithful secretary, Wiart. With the exception of her correspondence with the Duchesse de Choiseul, she bequeathed all her letters to Horace Walpole. She was seventy and Walpole fifty when they met and their famous attachment and correspondence began.
Her quarrel with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and the Encyclopaedists had just occurred; she was within a few years of seventy; and it must have seemed to her that, after such a break, at such an age, there was little left for her to do but to die quietly.
There are few distinguished Frenchmen with whose fame some more or less gifted woman is not closely allied. Montaigne and Mlle. de Gournay, La Rochefoucauld and Mme. de La Fayette, d'Alembert and Mlle. de Lespinasse, Chateaubriand and Mme.
Mlle. de Lespinasse was of the later era of Rousseau; the era of exaggerated feeling, of emotional delirium, of romantic dreams; the era whose heroine was the loving and sentimental "Julie," for whose portrait she might have sat, with a shade or so less of intellect and brilliancy. But it was more than a romantic dream that shadowed and shortened the life of Mlle. de Lespinasse.
It was her habit to lie awake all night and sleep all day, and as she did not receive her guests until six o'clock, Mlle. de Lespinasse, whose amiable character and conversational charm had endeared her at once to the circle of her patroness, arranged to see her personal friends among whom were d'Alembert, Turgot, Chastellux, and Marmontel in her own apartments for an hour before the marquise appeared.
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