But the most striking point in the career of this worldly woman was her friendship for Horace Walpole. When they first met she was nearly seventy, blind, ill-tempered, bitter, and hopelessly ennuyee. He was not yet fifty, a brilliant, versatile man of the world, and saw her only at long intervals. Their curious correspondence extends over a period of fifteen years, ending only with her death.
In a letter to Grayson, after meeting her, he writes: "Mme. du Deffand is now very old and stone blind, but retains all her vivacity, wit, memory, judgment, passion, and agreeableness. She goes to operas, plays, suppers, Versailles; gives supper twice a week; has everything new read to her; makes new songs and epigrams—aye, admirably—and remembers every one that has been made these fourscore years. She corresponds with Voltaire, dictates charming letters to him, contradicts him, is no bigot to him or anybody, and laughs both at the clergy and the philosophers. In a dispute, into which she easily falls, she is very warm, and yet scarce ever in the wrong; her judgment on every subject is as just as possible; on every point of conduct as wrong as possible; for she is all love and hatred, passionate for her friends to enthusiasm, still anxious to be loved—I don't mean by lovers—and a vehement enemy openly."
The acquaintance thus begun quickly drilled into an intimacy. Friendship she calls this absorbing sentiment, but it has all the caprices and inconsistencies of love. Fed by the imagination, and prevented by separation from wearing itself out, it became the most permanent interest of her life. There is something curiously pathetic in the submissive attitude of this blind, aged, but spirited woman—who scoffs at sentiment and confesses that she could never love anything—towards the man who criticizes her, scolds her, crushes back her too ardent feeling, yet calls her his dear old friend, writes her a weekly letter, and modestly declares that she "loves him better than all France together."
The spirit of this correspondence greatly modifies the impression which her own words, as well as the facts of her career, would naturally give us. We find in the letters of this period little of the freshness and spontaneity that lent such a charm to the letters of Mme. de Sevigne and her contemporaries. Women still write of the incidents of their lives, the people they meet, their jealousies, their rivalries, their loves, and their follies; but they think, where they formerly mirrored the world about them. They analyze, they compare, the criticize, they formulate their own emotions, they add opinions to facts. The gaiety, the sparkle, the wit, the play of feeling, is not there. Occasionally there is the tone of passion, as in the letters of Mlle. Aisse and Mlle. de Lespinasse, but this is rare. Even passion has grown sophisticated and deals with phrases. There is more or less artificiality in the exchange of written thoughts. Mme. du Deffand thinks while she writes, and what she sees takes always the color of her own intelligence. She complains of her inability to catch the elusive quality, the clearness, the flexibility of Mme. de Sevigne, whom she longs to rival because Walpole so admires her. But if she lacks the vivacity, the simplicity, the poetic grace of her model, she has qualities not less striking, though less lovable. Her keen insight is unfailing. With masterly penetration she grasps the essence of things. No one has portrayed so concisely and so vividly the men and women of her time. No one has discriminated between the shades of character with such nicety. No one has so clearly fathomed the underlying motives of action. No one has forecast the outcome of theories and events with such prophetic vision. The note of bitterness and cynicism is always there. The nature of the woman reveals itself in every line: keen, dry, critical, with clear ideals which she can never hope to attain. But we feel that she has stripped off the rags of pretension and brought us face to face with realities. "All that I can do is to love you with all my heart, as I have done for about fifty years," wrote Voltaire. "How could I fail to love you? Your soul seeks always the true; it is a quality as rare as truth itself." So far does she carry her hatred of insincerity that one is often tempted to believe she affects a freedom from affectation. "I am so fatigued with the vanity of others that I avoid the occasion of having any myself," she writes. Is there not here a trace of the quality she so despises?
But beneath all this runs the swift undercurrent of an absorbing passion. A passion of friendship it may be, but it forces itself through the arid shells of conventionalism; it is at once the agony and the consolation of a despairing soul. Heartless, Mme. du Deffand is called, and her life seems to prove the truth of the verdict; but these letters throb and palpitate with feeling which she laughs at, but cannot still. It is the cry of the soul for what it has not; what the world cannot give; what it has somehow missed out of a cold, hard, restless, and superficial existence. With a need of loving, she is satisfied with no one. There is something wanting; even in the affection of her friends. "Ma grand'maman," she says to the gentle Duchesse de Choiseul, "you KNOW that you love me, but you do not FEEL it."
Devouring herself in solitude, she despises the society she cannot do without. "Men and women appear to me puppets who go, come, talk, laugh, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling," she writes. She confesses that she has a thousand troubles in assembling a choice company of people who bore her to death. "One sees only masks, one hears only lies," is her constant refrain. She does not want to live, but is afraid to die; she says she is not made for this world, but does not know that there is any other. She tries devotion, but has no taste for it. Of the light that shines from within upon so many darkened and weary souls she has no knowledge. Her vision is bounded by the tangible, which offers only a rigid barrier, against which her life flutters itself away. She dies as she has lived, with a deepened conviction of the nothingness of existence. "Spare me three things," she said to her confessor in her last moments; "let me have no questions, no reasons, and no sermons." Seeing Wiart, her faithful servitor, in tears, she remarks pathetically, as if surprised, "You love me then?" "Divert yourself as much as you can," was her final message to Walpole. "You will regret me, because one is very glad to know that one is loved." She commends to his care and affection Tonton, her little dog.
Strong but not gentle, brilliant but not tender, too penetrating for any illusions, with a nature forever at war with itself, its surroundings, and its limitations, no one better points the moral of an age without faith, without ideals, without the inner light that reveals to hope what is denied to sense.
The influence of such a woman with her gifts, her energy, her power, and her social prestige, can hardly be estimated. It was not in the direction of the new drift of thought. "I am not a fanatic as to liberty," she said; "I believe it is an error to pretend that it exists in a democracy. One has a thousand tyrants in place of one." She had no breadth of sympathy, and her interests were largely personal; but in matters of style and form her taste was unerring. Pitiless in her criticisms, she held firmly to her ideals of clear, elegant, and concise expression, both in literature and in conversation. She tolerated no latitudes, no pretension, and left behind her the traditions of a society that blended, more perfectly, perhaps, than any other of her time, the best intellectual life with courtly manners and a strict observance of les convenances.