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Updated: June 21, 2025
Guided by a French prisoner, probably one of the deserters from La Salle, they pushed their way across wild and arid plains, rivers, prairies, and forests, till at length they approached the Bay of St. Bernard. Manuscript map of "Route que firent les Espagnols, pour venir enlever les Francais restez a la Baye St. Bernard ou St. Louis, apres la perte du vaisseau de Mr. de la Salle, en 1689."
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,
Reason then, I repeat it again, within yourself, CONSEQUENTIALLY; and let not the pains you have taken, and still take, to please in some things be a 'pure perte', by your negligence of, and inattention to others of much less trouble, and much more consequence.
To Novar and Ardross, where good shooting. Then to Uppat, boating and fishing with the Duke of Sutherland, George Loch, and Forsyth. We went from Uppat to Brahan; then to Dunnichen and Springfield, a place near Roslyn the Dempsters had taken. Then to Abington and home. From M. Guizot Val Richer, 15 Aout. My dear Sir, Sir Alexander Gordon m'avait annonce la perte que nous venons de faire.
Oui, c'etait par un soir joyeux de cabaret, Un de ces soirs plutot trop chauds ou l'on dirait Que le gaz du plafond conspire a notre perte Avec le vin du zinc, saveur naive et verte. On s'amusait beaucoup dans la boutique et on Entendait des soupirs voisins d'accordeon Que ponctuaient des pieds frappant presque en cadence.
Que Dieu me favorise assez pour que je n'en aie plus, parceque je suis désolé de la perte de mes anciens amis et comrades. Letter to Doumouriex, June 26, 1815. If Buonaparte is to be put to Death, he will not be his Executioneer. General has been here this day to negociate for Napoleon's passing to America, to which proposition I have answered, that I have no authority.
"'Quelle perte irréparable? That always struck me as the most humorous thing ever said." "No," said Wilson, gravely, "but when he said that the prospect of death would be to him infinitely less sublime, if it did not involve his own extinction; the notion being, I suppose, that death is the triumphant affirmation of the supremacy of the race over the individual.
A general easy civility and attention to the common run of ugly women, and of middling men, both which I sillily thought, called, and treated, as odd people, would have made me as many friends, as by the contrary conduct I made myself enemies. All this too was 'a pure perte'; for I might equally, and even more successfully, have made my court, when I had particular views to gratify.
At two o'clock that morning, Schmucke and Pons walked home along the boulevards, philosophizing a perte de raison as they went on the harmony pervading the arrangements of this our world below. On the morrow of the banquet, Cousin Pons betook himself to his fair cousin the Presidente, overjoyed poor dear noble soul! to return good for evil.
These collections must be liberal, as few places are so free from beggars as Geneva. The Perte du Rhone, or the spot where the Rhone suddenly sinks into the ground, forms one of the objects usually visited from Geneva, and I accepted a proposal to join a party in making an excursion thither.
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