When Napoleon was starting for his campaign in Russia, he ordered the
proof-sheets of a forthcoming book, about which there had been some
disagreement among the censors of the press, to be put into his
carriage, so that he might decide for himself what suppressions it might
be necessary to make. 'Je m'ennuie en route; je lirai ces volumes, et
j'écrirai de Mayence ce qu'il y aura à faire.' The volumes thus chosen
to beguile the imperial leisure between Paris and Mayence contained the
famous correspondence of Madame du Deffand with Horace Walpole. By the
Emperor's command a few excisions were made, and the book--reprinted
from Miss Berry's original edition which had appeared two years earlier
in England--was published almost at once. The sensation in Paris was
immense; the excitement of the Russian campaign itself was half
forgotten; and for some time the blind old inhabitant of the Convent of
Saint Joseph held her own as a subject of conversation with the burning
of Moscow and the passage of the Berezina. We cannot wonder that this
was so. In the Parisian drawing-room of those days the letters of Madame
du Deffand must have exercised a double fascination--on the one hand as
a mine of gossip about numberless persons and events still familiar to
many a living memory, and, on the other, as a detailed and brilliant
record of a state of society which had already ceased to be actual and
become historical. The letters were hardly more than thirty years old;
but the world which they depicted in all its intensity and all its
singularity--the world of the old régime--had vanished for ever into
limbo. Between it and the eager readers of the First Empire a gulf was
fixed--a narrow gulf, but a deep one, still hot and sulphurous with the
volcanic fires of the Revolution. Since then a century has passed; the
gulf has widened; and the vision which these curious letters show us
to-day seems hardly less remote--from some points of view, indeed, even
more--than that which is revealed to us in the Memoirs of Cellini or the
correspondence of Cicero. Yet the vision is not simply one of a strange
and dead antiquity: there is a personal and human element in the letters
which gives them a more poignant interest, and brings them close to
ourselves. The soul of man is not subject to the rumour of periods; and
these pages, impregnated though they be with the abolished life of the
eighteenth century, can never be out of date.
A fortunate chance enables us now, for the first time, to appreciate
them in their completeness. The late Mrs. Paget Toynbee, while preparing
her edition of Horace Walpole's letters, came upon the trace of the
original manuscripts, which had long lain hidden in obscurity in a
country house in Staffordshire. The publication of these manuscripts in
full, accompanied by notes and indexes in which Mrs. Toynbee's
well-known accuracy, industry, and tact are everywhere conspicuous, is
an event of no small importance to lovers of French literature. A great
mass of new and deeply interesting material makes its appearance. The
original edition produced by Miss Berry in 1810, from which all the
subsequent editions were reprinted with varying degrees of inaccuracy,
turns out to have contained nothing more than a comparatively small
fraction of the whole correspondence; of the 838 letters published by
Mrs. Toynbee, 485 are entirely new, and of the rest only 52 were printed
by Miss Berry in their entirety. Miss Berry's edition was, in fact,
simply a selection, and as a selection it deserves nothing but praise.
It skims the cream of the correspondence; and it faithfully preserves
the main outline of the story which the letters reveal. No doubt that
was enough for the readers of that generation; indeed, even for the more
exacting reader of to-day, there is something a little overwhelming in
the closely packed 2000 pages of Mrs. Toynbee's volumes. Enthusiasm
alone will undertake to grapple with them, but enthusiasm will be
rewarded. In place of the truthful summary of the earlier editions, we
have now the truth itself--the truth in all its subtle gradations, all
its long-drawn-out suspensions, all its intangible and irremediable
obscurities: it is the difference between a clear-cut drawing in
black-and-white and a finished painting in oils. Probably Miss Berry's
edition will still be preferred by the ordinary reader who wishes to
become acquainted with a celebrated figure in French literature; but
Mrs. Toynbee's will always be indispensable for the historical student,
and invaluable for anyone with the leisure, the patience, and the taste
for a detailed and elaborate examination of a singular adventure of the
heart.
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
là.' No doubt her dislike of the Encyclopaedists and all their works was
in part a matter of personal pique--the result of her famous quarrel
with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, under whose opposing banner d'Alembert
and all the intellectual leaders of Parisian society had unhesitatingly
ranged themselves. But that quarrel was itself far more a symptom of a
deeply rooted spiritual antipathy than a mere vulgar struggle for
influence between two rival _salonnières_. There are indications that,
even before it took place, the elder woman's friendship for d'Alembert
was giving way under the strain of her scorn for his advanced views and
her hatred of his proselytising cast of mind. 'Il y a de certains
articles,' she complained to Voltaire in 1763--a year before the final
estrangement--'qui sont devenus pour lui affaires de parti, et sur
lesquels je ne lui trouve pas le sens commun.' The truth is that
d'Alembert and his friends were moving, and Madame du Deffand was
standing still. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse simply precipitated and
intensified an inevitable rupture. She was the younger generation
knocking at the door.
Madame du Deffand's generation had, indeed, very little in common with
that ardent, hopeful, speculative, sentimental group of friends who met
together every evening in the drawing-room of Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse. Born at the close of the seventeenth century, she had come
into the world in the brilliant days of the Regent, whose witty and
licentious reign had suddenly dissipated the atmosphere of gloom and
bigotry imposed upon society by the moribund Court of Louis XIV. For a
fortnight (so she confessed to Walpole) she was actually the Regent's
mistress; and a fortnight, in those days, was a considerable time. Then
she became the intimate friend of Madame de Prie--the singular woman
who, for a moment, on the Regent's death, during the government of M. le
Duc, controlled the destinies of France, and who committed suicide when
that amusement was denied her. During her early middle age Madame du
Deffand was one of the principal figures in the palace of Sceaux, where
the Duchesse du Maine, the grand-daughter of the great Condé and the
daughter-in-law of Louis XIV., kept up for many years an almost royal
state among the most distinguished men and women of the time. 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.
The nature of that society is plainly enough revealed in the letters and
the memoirs that have come down to us. The days of formal pomp and vast
representation had ended for ever when the 'Grand Monarque' was no
longer to be seen strutting, in periwig and red-heeled shoes, down the
glittering gallery of Versailles; the intimacy and seclusion of modern
life had not yet begun. It was an intermediate period, and the
comparatively small group formed by the elite of the rich, refined, and
intelligent classes led an existence in which the elements of publicity
and privacy were curiously combined. Never, certainly, before or since,
have any set of persons lived so absolutely and unreservedly with and
for their friends as these high ladies and gentlemen of the middle years
of the eighteenth century. The circle of one's friends was, in those
days, the framework of one's whole being; within which was to be found
all that life had to offer, and outside of which no interest, however
fruitful, no passion, however profound, no art, however soaring, was of
the slightest account. Thus while in one sense the ideal of such a
society was an eminently selfish one, it is none the less true that
there have been very few societies indeed in which the ordinary forms of
personal selfishness have played so small a part. The selfishness of the
eighteenth century was a communal selfishness. Each individual was
expected to practise, and did in fact practise to a consummate degree,
those difficult arts which make the wheels of human intercourse run
smoothly--the arts of tact and temper, of frankness and sympathy, of
delicate compliment and exquisite self-abnegation--with the result that
a condition of living was produced which, in all its superficial and
obvious qualities, was one of unparalleled amenity. Indeed, those
persons who were privileged to enjoy it showed their appreciation of it
in an unequivocal way--by the tenacity with which they clung to the
scene of such delights and graces. They refused to grow old; they almost
refused to die. Time himself seems to have joined their circle, to have
been infected with their politeness, and to have absolved them, to the
furthest possible point, from the operation of his laws. 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. Another contemporary, Richelieu, who was famous for his
adventures while Louis XIV. was still on the throne, lived till within a
year of the opening of the States-General. More typical still of this
singular and fortunate generation was Fontenelle, who, one morning in
his hundredth year, quietly observed that he felt a difficulty in
existing, and forthwith, even more quietly, ceased to do so.
Yet, though the wheels of life rolled round with such an alluring
smoothness, they did not roll of themselves; the skill and care of
trained mechanicians were needed to keep them going; and the task was no
light one. Even Fontenelle himself, fitted as he was for it by being
blessed (as one of his friends observed) with two brains and no heart,
realised to the full the hard conditions of social happiness. 'Il y a
peu de choses,' he wrote, 'aussi difficiles et aussi dangereuses que le
commerce des hommes.' The sentence, true for all ages, was particularly
true for his own. The graceful, easy motions of that gay company were
those of dancers balanced on skates, gliding, twirling, interlacing,
over the thinnest ice. Those drawing-rooms, those little circles, so
charming with the familiarity of their privacy, were themselves the
rigorous abodes of the deadliest kind of public opinion--the kind that
lives and glitters in a score of penetrating eyes. They required in
their votaries the absolute submission that reigns in religious
orders--the willing sacrifice of the entire life. The intimacy of
personal passion, the intensity of high endeavour--these things must be
left behind and utterly cast away by all who would enter that narrow
sanctuary. Friendship might be allowed there, and flirtation disguised
as love; but the overweening and devouring influence of love itself
should never be admitted to destroy the calm of daily intercourse and
absorb into a single channel attentions due to all. Politics were to be
tolerated, so long as they remained a game; so soon as they grew serious
and envisaged the public good, they became insufferable. As for
literature and art, though they might be excellent as subjects for
recreation and good talk, what could be more preposterous than to treat
such trifles as if they had a value of their own? Only one thing; and
that was to indulge, in the day-dreams of religion or philosophy, the
inward ardours of the soul. 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. While still a young girl in a
convent school, she had shrugged her shoulders when the nuns began to
instruct her in the articles of their faith. The matter was considered
serious, and the great Massillon, then at the height of his fame as a
preacher and a healer of souls, was sent for to deal with the youthful
heretic. She was not impressed by his arguments. In his person the
generous fervour and the massive piety of an age that could still
believe felt the icy and disintegrating touch of a new and strange
indifference. 'Mais qu'elle est jolie!' he murmured as he came away. The
Abbess ran forward to ask what holy books he recommended. 'Give her a
threepenny Catechism,' was Massillon's reply. He had seen that the case
was hopeless.
An innate scepticism, a profound levity, an antipathy to enthusiasm that
wavered between laughter and disgust, combined with an unswerving
devotion to the exacting and arduous ideals of social intercourse--such
were the characteristics of the brilliant group of men and women who had
spent their youth at the Court of the Regent, and dallied out their
middle age down the long avenues of Sceaux. About the middle of the
century the Duchesse du Maine died, and Madame du Deffand established
herself in Paris at the Convent of Saint Joseph in a set of rooms which
still showed traces--in the emblazoned arms over the great
mantelpiece--of the occupation of Madame de Montespan. A few years later
a physical affliction overtook her: at the age of fifty-seven she became
totally blind; and this misfortune placed her, almost without a
transition, among the ranks of the old. For the rest of her life she
hardly moved from her drawing-room, which speedily became the most
celebrated in Europe. The thirty years of her reign there fall into two
distinct and almost equal parts. The first, during which d'Alembert was
pre-eminent, came to an end with the violent expulsion of Mademoiselle
de Lespinasse. During the second, which lasted for the rest of her life,
her salon, purged of the Encyclopaedists, took on a more decidedly
worldly tone; and the influence of Horace Walpole was supreme.
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, 'à travers tous ces
éloges, je m'avisai de l'appeler Puffendorf,' and Puffendorf the poor
man remained for evermore. Besides the diplomats, nearly every foreign
traveller of distinction found his way to the renowned _salon_;
Englishmen were particularly frequent visitors; and among the familiar
figures of whom we catch more than one glimpse in the letters to Walpole
are Burke, Fox, and Gibbon. Sometimes influential parents in England
obtained leave for their young sons to be admitted into the centre of
Parisian refinement. The English cub, fresh from Eton, was introduced by
his tutor into the red and yellow drawing-room, where the great circle
of a dozen or more elderly important persons, glittering in jewels and
orders, pompous in powder and rouge, ranged in rigid order round the
fireplace, followed with the precision of a perfect orchestra the
leading word or smile or nod of an ancient Sibyl, who seemed to survey
the company with her eyes shut, from a vast chair by the wall. It is
easy to imagine the scene, in all its terrifying politeness. Madame du
Deffand could not tolerate young people; she declared that she did not
know what to say to them; and they, no doubt, were in precisely the same
difficulty. To an English youth, unfamiliar with the language and shy
as only English youths can be, a conversation with that redoubtable old
lady must have been a grim ordeal indeed. One can almost hear the
stumbling, pointless observations, almost see the imploring looks cast,
from among the infinitely attentive company, towards the tutor, and the
pink ears growing still more pink. But such awkward moments were rare.
As a rule the days flowed on in easy monotony--or rather, not the days,
but the nights. For Madame du Deffand rarely rose till five o'clock in
the evening; at six she began her reception; and at nine or half-past
the central moment of the twenty-four hours arrived--the moment of
supper. Upon this event the whole of her existence hinged. Supper, she
used to say, was one of the four ends of man, and what the other three
were she could never remember. She lived up to her dictum. She had an
income of £1400 a year, and of this she spent more than half--£720--on
food. These figures should be largely increased to give them their
modern values; but, economise as she might, she found that she could
only just manage to rub along. Her parties varied considerably in size;
sometimes only four or five persons sat down to supper--sometimes twenty
or thirty. No doubt they were elaborate meals. In a moment of economy we
find the hospitable lady making pious resolutions: she would no longer
give 'des repas'--only ordinary suppers for six people at the most, at
which there should be served nothing more than two entrées, one roast,
two sweets, and--mysterious addition--'la pièce du milieu.' This was
certainly moderate for those days (Monsieur de Jonsac rarely provided
fewer than fourteen entrées), but such resolutions did not last long. A
week later she would suddenly begin to issue invitations wildly, and,
day after day, her tables would be loaded with provisions for thirty
guests. But she did not always have supper at home. From time to time
she sallied forth in her vast coach and rattled through the streets of
Paris to one of her still extant dowagers--a Maréchale, or a
Duchesse--or the more and more 'délabré Président.' There the same
company awaited her as that which met in her own house; it was simply a
change of decorations; often enough for weeks together she had supper
every night with the same half-dozen persons. The entertainment, apart
from the supper itself, hardly varied. Occasionally there was a little
music, more often there were cards and gambling. Madame du Deffand
disliked gambling, but she loathed going to bed, and, if it came to a
choice between the two, she did not hesitate: once, at the age of
seventy-three, she sat up till seven o'clock in the morning playing
vingt-et-un with Charles Fox. But distractions of that kind were merely
incidental to the grand business of the night--the conversation. In the
circle that, after an eight hours' sitting, broke up reluctantly at two
or three every morning to meet again that same evening at six, talk
continually flowed. For those strange creatures it seemed to form the
very substance of life itself. It was the underlying essence, the
circumambient ether, in which alone the pulsations of existence had
their being; it was the one eternal reality; men might come and men
might go, but talk went on for ever. It is difficult, especially for
those born under the Saturnine influence of an English sky, quite to
realise the nature of such conversation. Brilliant, charming,
easy-flowing, gay and rapid it must have been; never profound, never
intimate, never thrilling; but also never emphatic, never affected,
never languishing, and never dull. Madame du Deffand herself had a most
vigorous flow of language. 'Écoutez! Écoutez!' Walpole used constantly
to exclaim, trying to get in his points; but in vain; the sparkling
cataract swept on unheeding. And indeed to listen was the wiser part--to
drink in deliciously the animation of those quick, illimitable,
exquisitely articulated syllables, to surrender one's whole soul to the
pure and penetrating precision of those phrases, to follow without a
breath the happy swiftness of that fine-spun thread of thought. Then at
moments her wit crystallised; the cataract threw off a shower of radiant
jewels, which one caught as one might. Some of these have come down to
us. Her remark on Montesquieu's great book--'C'est de l'esprit sur les
lois'--is an almost final criticism. Her famous 'mot de Saint Denis,' so
dear to the heart of Voltaire, deserves to be once more recorded. A
garrulous and credulous Cardinal was describing the martyrdom of Saint
Denis the Areopagite: when his head was cut off, he took it up and
carried it in his hands. That, said the Cardinal, was well known; what
was not well known was the extraordinary fact that he walked with his
head under his arm all the way from Montmartre to the Church of Saint
Denis--a distance of six miles. 'Ah, Monseigneur!' said Madame du
Deffand, 'dans une telle situation, il n'y a que le premier pas qui
coûte.' At two o'clock the brilliance began to flag; the guests began to
go; the dreadful moment was approaching. If Madame de Gramont happened
to be there, there was still some hope, for Madame de Gramont abhorred
going to bed almost as much as Madame du Deffand. Or there was just a
chance that the Duc de Choiseul might come in at the last moment, and
stay on for a couple of hours. But at length it was impossible to
hesitate any longer; the chariot was at the door. She swept off, but it
was still early; it was only half-past three; and the coachman was
ordered to drive about the Boulevards for an hour before going home.
It was, after all, only natural that she should put off going to bed,
for she rarely slept for more than two or three hours. The greater part
of that empty time, during which conversation was impossible, she
devoted to her books. But she hardly ever found anything to read that
she really enjoyed. Of the two thousand volumes she possessed--all bound
alike, and stamped on the back with her device of a cat--she had only
read four or five hundred; the rest were impossible. She perpetually
complained to Walpole of the extreme dearth of reading matter. In
nothing, indeed, is the contrast more marked between that age and ours
than in the quantity of books available for the ordinary reader. How the
eighteenth century would envy us our innumerable novels, our
biographies, our books of travel, all our easy approaches to knowledge
and entertainment, our translations, our cheap reprints! In those days,
even for a reader of catholic tastes, there was really very little to
read. And, of course, Madame du Deffand's tastes were far from
catholic--they were fastidious to the last degree. She considered that
Racine alone of writers had reached perfection, and that only once--in
_Athalie_. Corneille carried her away for moments, but on the whole he
was barbarous. She highly admired 'quelques centaines de vers de M. de
Voltaire.' She thought Richardson and Fielding excellent, and she was
enraptured by the style--but only by the style--of _Gil Blas_. And that
was all. Everything else appeared to her either affected or pedantic or
insipid. Walpole recommended to her a History of Malta; she tried it,
but she soon gave it up--it mentioned the Crusades. She began Gibbon,
but she found him superficial. She tried Buffon, but he was 'd'une
monotonie insupportable; il sait bien ce qu'il sait, mais il ne s'occupe
que des bêtes; il faut l'être un peu soi-même pour se dévouer à une
telle occupation.' She got hold of the memoirs of Saint-Simon in
manuscript, and these amused her enormously; but she was so disgusted by
the style that she was very nearly sick. At last, in despair, she
embarked on a prose translation of Shakespeare. The result was
unexpected; she was positively pleased. _Coriolanus_, it is true, 'me
semble, sauf votre respect, épouvantable, et n'a pas le sens commun';
and 'pour _La Tempête_, je ne suis pas touchée de ce genre.' But she was
impressed by _Othello_; she was interested by _Macbeth_; and she admired
_Julius Caesar_, in spite of its bad taste. At _King Lear_, indeed, she
had to draw the line. 'Ah, mon Dieu! Quelle pièce! Réellement la
trouvez-vous belle? Elle me noircit l'âme à un point que je ne puis
exprimer; c'est un amas de toutes les horreurs infernales.' Her reader
was an old soldier from the Invalides, who came round every morning
early, and took up his position by her bedside. She lay back among the
cushions, listening, for long hours. Was there ever a more incongruous
company, a queerer trysting-place, for Goneril and Desdemona, Ariel and
Lady Macbeth?
Often, even before the arrival of the old pensioner, she was at work
dictating a letter, usually to Horace Walpole, occasionally to Madame de
Choiseul or Voltaire. Her letters to Voltaire are enchanting; his
replies are no less so; and it is much to be regretted that the whole
correspondence has never been collected together in chronological order,
and published as a separate book. The slim volume would be, of its kind,
quite perfect. There was no love lost between the two old friends; they
could not understand each other; Voltaire, alone of his generation, had
thrown himself into the very vanguard of thought; to Madame du Deffand
progress had no meaning, and thought itself was hardly more than an
unpleasant necessity. She distrusted him profoundly, and he returned the
compliment. Yet neither could do without the other: through her, he kept
in touch with one of the most influential circles in Paris; and even she
could not be insensible to the glory of corresponding with such a man.
Besides, in spite of all their differences, they admired each other
genuinely, and they were held together by the habit of a long
familiarity. The result was a marvellous display of epistolary art. If
they had liked each other any better, they never would have troubled to
write so well. They were on their best behaviour--exquisitely courteous
and yet punctiliously at ease, like dancers in a minuet. His cajoleries
are infinite; his deft sentences, mingling flattery with reflection,
have almost the quality of a caress. She replies in the tone of a
worshipper, glancing lightly at a hundred subjects, purring out her
'Monsieur de Voltaire,' and seeking his advice on literature and life.
He rejoins in that wonderful strain of epicurean stoicism of which he
alone possessed the secret: and so the letters go on. Sometimes one just
catches the glimpse of a claw beneath the soft pad, a grimace under the
smile of elegance; and one remembers with a shock that, after all, one
is reading the correspondence of a monkey and a cat.
Madame du Deffand's style reflects, perhaps even more completely than
that of Voltaire himself, the common-sense of the eighteenth century.
Its precision is absolute. It is like a line drawn in one stroke by a
master, with the prompt exactitude of an unerring subtlety. There is no
breadth in it--no sense of colour and the concrete mass of things. One
cannot wonder, as one reads her, that she hardly regretted her
blindness. What did she lose by it? Certainly not
The sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's rose;
for what did she care for such particulars when her eyes were at their
clearest? Her perception was intellectual; and to the penetrating
glances of her mental vision the objects of the sensual world were mere
irrelevance. The kind of writing produced by such a quality of mind may
seem thin and barren to those accustomed to the wealth and variety of
the Romantic school. Yet it will repay attention. The vocabulary is very
small; but every word is the right one; this old lady of high society,
who had never given a thought to her style, who wrote--and spelt--by the
light of nature, was a past mistress of that most difficult of literary
accomplishments--'l'art de dire en un mot tout ce qu'un mot peut dire.'
The object of all art is to make suggestions. The romantic artist
attains that end by using a multitude of different stimuli, by calling
up image after image, recollection after recollection, until the
reader's mind is filled and held by a vivid and palpable evocation; the
classic works by the contrary method of a fine economy, and, ignoring
everything but what is essential, trusts, by means of the exact
propriety of his presentation, to produce the required effect. Madame du
Deffand carries the classical ideal to its furthest point. She never
strikes more than once, and she always hits the nail on the head. Such
is her skill that she sometimes seems to beat the Romantics even on
their own ground: her reticences make a deeper impression than all the
dottings of their i's. The following passage from a letter to Walpole is
characteristic:
Nous eûmes une musique charmante, une dame qui joue de la harpe à
merveille; elle me fit tant de plaisir que j'eus du regret que vous
ne l'entendissiez pas; c'est un instrument admirable. Nous eûmes
aussi un clavecin, mais quoiqu'il fût touché avec une grande
perfection, ce n'est rien en comparaison de la harpe. Je fus fort
triste toute la soirée; j'avais appris en partant que Mme. de
Luxembourg, qui était allée samedi à Montmorency pour y passer
quinze jours, s'était trouvée si mal qu'on avait fait venir
Tronchin, et qu'on l'avait ramenée le dimanche à huit heures du
soir, qu'on lui croyait de l'eau dans la poitrine. L'ancienneté de
la connaissance; une habitude qui a l'air de l'amitié; voir
disparaître ceux avec qui l'on vit; un retour sur soi-même; sentir
que l'on ne tient à rien, que tout fuit, que tout échappe, qu'on
reste seule dans l'univers, et que malgré cela on craint de le
quitter; voilà ce qui m'occupa pendant la musique.
Here are no coloured words, no fine phrases--only the most flat and
ordinary expressions--'un instrument admirable'--'une grande
perfection'--'fort triste.' Nothing is described; and yet how much is
suggested! The whole scene is conjured up--one does not know how; one's
imagination is switched on to the right rails, as it were, by a look, by
a gesture, and then left to run of itself. In the simple, faultless
rhythm of that closing sentence, the trembling melancholy of the old
harp seems to be lingering still.
While the letters to Voltaire show us nothing but the brilliant exterior
of Madame du Deffand's mind, those to Walpole reveal the whole state of
her soul. The revelation is not a pretty one. Bitterness, discontent,
pessimism, cynicism, boredom, regret, despair--these are the feelings
that dominate every page. To a superficial observer Madame du Deffand's
lot must have seemed peculiarly enviable; she was well off, she enjoyed
the highest consideration, she possessed intellectual talents of the
rarest kind which she had every opportunity of displaying, and she was
surrounded by a multitude of friends. What more could anyone desire? The
harsh old woman would have smiled grimly at such a question. 'A little
appetite,' she might have answered. She was like a dyspeptic at a feast;
the finer the dishes that were set before her, the greater her
distaste; that spiritual gusto which lends a savour to the meanest act
of living, and without which all life seems profitless, had gone from
her for ever. Yet--and this intensified her wretchedness--though the
banquet was loathsome to her, she had not the strength to tear herself
away from the table. Once, in a moment of desperation, she had thoughts
of retiring to a convent, but she soon realised that such an action was
out of the question. Fate had put her into the midst of the world, and
there she must remain. 'Je ne suis point assez heureuse,' she said, 'de
me passer des choses dont je ne me soucie pas.' She was extremely
lonely. As fastidious in friendship as in literature, she passed her
life among a crowd of persons whom she disliked and despised, 'Je ne
vois que des sots et des fripons,' she said; and she did not know which
were the most disgusting. She took a kind of deadly pleasure in
analysing 'les nuances des sottises' among the people with whom she
lived. The varieties were many, from the foolishness of her companion,
Mademoiselle Sanadon, who would do nothing but imitate her--'elle fait
des définitions,' she wails--to that of the lady who hoped to prove her
friendship by unending presents of grapes and pears--'comme je n'y tâte
pas, cela diminue mes scrupules du peu de goût que j'ai pour elle.' Then
there were those who were not quite fools but something very near it.
'Tous les Matignon sont des sots,' said somebody one day to the Regent,
'excepté le Marquis de Matignon.' 'Cela est vrai,' the Regent replied,
'il n'est pas sot, mais on voit bien qu'il est le fils d'un sot.' Madame
du Deffand was an expert at tracing such affinities. For instance, there
was Necker. It was clear that Necker was not a fool, and yet--what was
it? Something was the matter--yes, she had it: he made you feel a fool
yourself--'l'on est plus bête avec lui que l'on ne l'est tout seul.' As
she said of herself: 'elle est toujours tentée d'arracher les masques
qu'elle rencontre.' Those blind, piercing eyes of hers spied out
unerringly the weakness or the ill-nature or the absurdity that lurked
behind the gravest or the most fascinating exterior; then her fingers
began to itch, and she could resist no longer--she gave way to her
besetting temptation. It is impossible not to sympathise with Rousseau's
remark about her--'J'aimai mieux encore m'exposer au fléau de sa haine
qu'à celui de son amitié.' There, sitting in her great Diogenes-tub of
an armchair--her 'tonneau' as she called it--talking, smiling,
scattering her bons mots, she went on through the night, in the
remorseless secrecy of her heart, tearing off the masks from the faces
that surrounded her. Sometimes the world in which she lived displayed
itself before her horrified inward vision like some intolerable and
meaningless piece of clock-work mechanism:
J'admirais hier au soir la nombreuse compagnie qui était chez moi;
hommes et femmes me paraissaient des machines à ressorts, qui
allaient, venaient, parlaient, riaient, sans penser, sans
réfléchir, sans sentir; chacun jouait son rôle par habitude: Madame
la Duchesse d'Aiguillon crevait de rire, Mme. de Forcalquier
dédaignait tout, Mme. de la Vallière jabotait sur tout. Les hommes
ne jouaient pas de meilleurs rôles, et moi j'étais abîmée dans les
réflexions les plus noires; je pensai que j'avais passé ma vie dans
les illusions; que je m'étais creusée tous les abîmes dans lesquels
j'étais tombée.
At other times she could see around her nothing but a mass of mutual
hatreds, into which she was plunged herself no less than her neighbours:
Je ramenai la Maréchale de Mirepoix chez elle; j'y descendis, je
causai une heure avec elle; je n'en fus pas mécontente. Elle hait
la petite Idole, elle hait la Maréchale de Luxembourg; enfin, sa
haine pour tous les gens qui me déplaisent me fit lui pardonner
l'indifférence et peut-être la haine qu'elle a pour moi. Convenez
que voilà une jolie société, un charmant commerce.
Once or twice for several months together she thought that she had found
in the Duchesse de Choiseul a true friend and a perfect companion. But
there was one fatal flaw even in Madame de Choiseul: she _was_
perfect!--'Elle est parfaite; et c'est un plus grand défaut qu'on ne
pense et qu'on ne saurait imaginer.' At last one day the inevitable
happened--she went to see Madame de Choiseul, and she was bored. 'Je
rentrai chez moi à une heure, pénétrée, persuadée qu'on ne peut être
content de personne.'
One person, however, there was who pleased her; and it was the final
irony of her fate that this very fact should have been the last drop
that caused the cup of her unhappiness to overflow. Horace Walpole had
come upon her at a psychological moment. 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. Then the gay, talented, fascinating Englishman appeared, and
she suddenly found that, so far from her life being over, she was
embarked for good and all upon her greatest adventure. What she
experienced at that moment was something like a religious conversion.
Her past fell away from her a dead thing; she was overwhelmed by an
ineffable vision; she, who had wandered for so many years in the ways of
worldly indifference, was uplifted all at once on to a strange summit,
and pierced with the intensest pangs of an unknown devotion.
Henceforward her life was dedicated; but, unlike the happier saints of a
holier persuasion, she was to find no peace on earth. It was, indeed,
hardly to be expected that Walpole, a blasé bachelor of fifty, should
have reciprocated so singular a passion; yet he might at least have
treated it with gentleness and respect. The total impression of him
which these letters produce is very damaging. It is true that he was in
a difficult position; and it is also true that, since only the merest
fragments of his side of the correspondence have been preserved, our
knowledge of the precise details of his conduct is incomplete;
nevertheless, it is clear that, on the whole, throughout the long and
painful episode, the principal motive which actuated him was an
inexcusable egoism. He was obsessed by a fear of ridicule. He knew that
letters were regularly opened at the French Post Office, and he lived in
terror lest some spiteful story of his absurd relationship with a blind
old woman of seventy should be concocted and set afloat among his
friends, or his enemies, in England, which would make him the
laughing-stock of society for the rest of his days. He was no less
terrified by the intensity of the sentiment of which he had become the
object. Thoroughly superficial and thoroughly selfish, immersed in his
London life of dilettantism and gossip, the weekly letters from France
with their burden of a desperate affection appalled him and bored him by
turns. He did not know what to do; and his perplexity was increased by
the fact that he really liked Madame du Deffand--so far as he could like
anyone--and also by the fact that his vanity was highly flattered by her
letters. Many courses were open to him, but the one he took was probably
the most cruel that he could have taken: he insisted with an absolute
rigidity on their correspondence being conducted in the tone of the most
ordinary friendship--on those terms alone, he said, would he consent to
continue it. And of course such terms were impossible to Madame du
Deffand. She accepted them--what else could she do?--but every line she
wrote was a denial of them. Then, periodically, there was an explosion.
Walpole stormed, threatened, declared he would write no more; and on her
side there were abject apologies, and solemn promises of amendment.
Naturally, it was all in vain. A few months later he would be attacked
by a fit of the gout, her solicitude would be too exaggerated, and the
same fury was repeated, and the same submission. One wonders what the
charm could have been that held that proud old spirit in such a
miserable captivity. Was it his very coldness that subdued her? If he
had cared for her a little more, perhaps she would have cared for him a
good deal less. But it is clear that what really bound her to him was
the fact that they so rarely met. If he had lived in Paris, if he had
been a member of her little clique, subject to the unceasing searchlight
of her nightly scrutiny, who can doubt that, sooner or later, Walpole
too would have felt 'le fléau de son amitié'? His mask, too, would have
been torn to tatters like the rest. But, as it was, his absence saved
him; her imagination clothed him with an almost mythic excellence; his
brilliant letters added to the impression; and then, at intervals of
about two years, he appeared in Paris for six weeks--just long enough to
rivet her chains, and not long enough to loosen them. And so it was that
she fell before him with that absolute and unquestioning devotion of
which only the most dominating and fastidious natures are capable. Once
or twice, indeed, she did attempt a revolt, but only succeeded in
plunging herself into a deeper subjection. After one of his most violent
and cruel outbursts, she refused to communicate with him further, and
for three or four weeks she kept her word; then she crept back and
pleaded for forgiveness. Walpole graciously granted it. It is with some
satisfaction that one finds him, a few weeks later, laid up with a
peculiarly painful attack of the gout.
About half-way through the correspondence there is an acute crisis,
after which the tone of the letters undergoes a marked change. After
seven years of struggle, Madame du Deffand's indomitable spirit was
broken; henceforward she would hope for nothing; she would gratefully
accept the few crumbs that might be thrown her; and for the rest she
resigned herself to her fate. Gradually sinking into extreme old age,
her self-repression and her bitterness grew ever more and more complete.
She was always bored; and her later letters are a series of variations
on the perpetual theme of 'ennui.' 'C'est une maladie de l'âme,' she
says, 'dont nous afflige la nature en nous donnant l'existence; c'est le
ver solitaire qui absorbe tout.' And again, 'l'ennui est l'avant-goût du
néant, mais le néant lui est préférable.' Her existence had become a
hateful waste--a garden, she said, from which all the flowers had been
uprooted and which had been sown with salt. 'Ah! Je le répète sans
cesse, il n'y a qu'un malheur, celui d'être né.' The grasshopper had
become a burden; and yet death seemed as little desirable as life.
'Comment est-il possible,' she asks, 'qu'on craigne la fin d'une vie
aussi triste?' When Death did come at last, he came very gently. She
felt his approaches, and dictated a letter to Walpole, bidding him, in
her strange fashion, an infinitely restrained farewell:
'Divertissez-vous, mon ami, le plus que vous pourrez; ne vous affligez
point de mon état, nous étions presque perdus l'un pour l'autre; nous ne
nous devions jamais revoir; vous me regretterez, parce qu'on est bien
aise de se savoir aimé.' That was her last word to him. Walpole might
have reached her before she finally lost consciousness, but, though he
realised her condition and knew well enough what his presence would have
been to her, he did not trouble to move. She died as she had lived--her
room crowded with acquaintances and the sound of a conversation in her
ears. When one reflects upon her extraordinary tragedy, when one
attempts to gauge the significance of her character and of her life, it
is difficult to know whether to pity most, to admire, or to fear.
Certainly there is something at once pitiable and magnificent in such an
unflinching perception of the futilities of living, such an
uncompromising refusal to be content with anything save the one thing
that it is impossible to have. But there is something alarming too; was
she perhaps right after all?