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Updated: June 18, 2025
Indeed, the scepticism of that generation was the most uncompromising that the world has known; for it did not even trouble to deny: it simply ignored. It presented a blank wall of perfect indifference alike to the mysteries of the universe and to the solutions of them. Madame du Deffand gave early proof that she shared to the full this propensity of her age.
I have a long letter almost every week from my flame also, Me du Deffand, but these are passions which non in seria ducunt. I should not be sorry to make another sejour there; but if I did, and it was with you, I should not throw away with old women and old Presidents, which is the same thing, some of those hours which I regret very much at this instant.
"Hors son milord March, il n'amie rien," writes Mme. du Deffand, in her portrait of Selwyn, whose unentailed property was left to the Duke of Queensberry, and who survived his friend by nineteen years.
The "Salon de Pomone," of Mme. de Marchais, received its name from Mme. du Deffand on account of the exquisite fruits and magnificent flowers which the hostess cultivated and distributed among her friends.
It was at Sceaux, with its endless succession of entertainments and conversations supper-parties and water-parties, concerts and masked balls, plays in the little theatre and picnics under the great trees of the park that Madame du Deffand came to her maturity and established her position as one of the leaders of the society in which she moved.
Madame du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole that Burke had been so well received, that he ought to leave France excellently pleased with the country. But it was not so. His spirit was perturbed by what he had listened to.
Her Letter is addressed "TO MADAME DU DEFFAND, at Paris;" most free-flowing female Letter; of many pages, runs on, day after day, for a fortnight or so; only Excerpts of it introducible here:
She confessed that she had a new language to learn, and she never fully mastered it. "Mme. Necker has talent, but it is in a sphere too elevated for one to communicate with her," said Mme. du Deffand, though she was glad to go once a week to her suppers at Saint-Ouen, and admitted that in spite of a certain stiffness and coldness she was better fitted for society than most of the grandes dames.
With the tact and facility of a Frenchwoman, she had a strong, active intellect, boundless ambition, indomitable energy, and the subtlety of an Italian. An incident of her early life, related by Mme. du Deffand, furnishes a key to her complex character, and reveals one secret of her influence.
Had there been the very slightest foundation for the calumnies which had been propagated against her, we may be sure that such a person as Madame du Deffand would not only have heard them, but would have been but too willing to believe them. His denunciation of them is a proof that she knew their falsehood. Goncourt, p. 388, quoting La Quotidienne of October 17th, 18th.
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