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As she appeared but little reassured, he persisted, for it would be an imprudence to let Phillis become enamored of the idea that if he attended Madame Dammauville, he would cure her, even if it required a miracle. "We have some time before us, since the 'ordonnance de renvoi' before the assizes is not yet given out.
The Marquise du Deffand was perhaps the most typical representative of that phase of civilisation which came into existence in Western Europe during the early years of the eighteenth century, and reached its most concentrated and characteristic form about the year 1750 in the drawing-rooms of Paris. She was supremely a woman of her age; but it is important to notice that her age was the first, and not the second, half of the eighteenth century: it was the age of the Regent Orleans, Fontenelle, and the young Voltaire; not that of Rousseau, the 'Encyclopaedia, and the Patriarch of Ferney. It is true that her letters to Walpole, to which her fame is mainly due, were written between 1766 and 1780; but they are the letters of an old woman, and they bear upon every page of them the traces of a mind to which the whole movement of contemporary life was profoundly distasteful. The new forces to which the eighteenth century gave birth in thought, in art, in sentiment, in action which for us form its peculiar interest and its peculiar glory were anathema to Madame du Deffand. In her letters to Walpole, whenever she compares the present with the past her bitterness becomes extreme. 'J'ai eu autrefois, she writes in 1778, 'des plaisirs indicibles aux opéras de Quinault et de Lulli, et au jeu de Thévenart et de la Lemaur. Pour aujourd'hui, tout me paraît détestable: acteurs, auteurs, musiciens, beaux esprits, philosophes, tout est de mauvais goût, tout est affreux, affreux. That great movement towards intellectual and political emancipation which centred in the 'Encyclopaedia' and the Philosophes was the object of her particular detestation. She saw Diderot once and that was enough for both of them. She could never understand why it was that M. de Voltaire would persist in wasting his talent for writing over such a dreary subject as religion. Turgot, she confessed, was an honest man, but he was also a 'sot animal. His dismissal from office that fatal act, which made the French Revolution inevitable delighted her: she concealed her feelings from Walpole, who admired him, but she was outspoken enough to the Duchesse de Choiseul. 'Le renvoi du Turgot me plaît extrêmement, she wrote; 'tout me paraît en bon train. And then she added, more prophetically than she knew, 'Mais, assurément, nous n'en resterons pas l
As she appeared but little reassured, he persisted, for it would be an imprudence to let Phillis become enamored of the idea that if he attended Madame Dammauville, he would cure her, even if it required a miracle. "We have some time before us, since the 'ordonnance de renvoi' before the assizes is not yet given out.
As she appeared but little reassured, he persisted, for it would be an imprudence to let Phillis become enamored of the idea that if he attended Madame Dammauville, he would cure her, even if it required a miracle. "We have some time before us, since the 'ordonnance de renvoi' before the assizes is not yet given out.
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