The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

Madame du Deffand was for a short time mistress of the Regent, is now very old and stone-blind, but retains all her vivacity, wit, memory, judgement, passions, and agreeableness. She goes to operas, plays, suppers, and Versailles; gives suppers twice a week; has everything new read to her; makes new songs and epigrams, ay, 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 judgement 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, but openly. As she can have no amusement but conversation, the least solitude and ennui are insupportable to her, and put her into the power of several worthless people, who eat her suppers when they can eat nobody’s of higher rank; wink to one another, and laugh at her; hate her because she has forty times more parts—and venture to hate her because she is not rich.[95]

It was natural that Walpole should prefer her society to Madame Geoffrin’s. Being Horace Walpole, it was inevitable that he should come to regard Madame Geoffrin’s coterie with disdain, to complain that it was made up of ‘pretended beaux esprits’ and faux savants, and that they were ‘very impertinent and dogmatic.’[96] Madame herself had offended him by calling him[97] ‘the new Richelieu’ in reference to his numerous conquests. Walpole grew suddenly afraid of the Geoffrin’s intimacy, and feared that he was becoming an object of ridicule. But in Madame du Deffand he found one of his own sort, a woman used to the society of the great but with no illusions about it, a woman who ruled her circle by despising almost every one who came into it, who had no faith in any one, and least of all in the authors and diplomats who surrounded her, and whose society she endured only because she found it less intolerable than her dark solitude.

In a beautiful letter to her on her blindness, which had become total about a dozen years before the period when we encounter her, Montesquieu reminded[98] her that they were both ‘small rebel spirits condemned to darkness.’ There is in truth something suggestive of the powers of darkness in Madame du Deffand’s pride and perversity. She was of a will never to submit or yield. Pride in the reputation she had made, a passionate delight in conversation, and, above all, the horror of her lonely hours of introspection determined her to continue her salon in spite of all. She did not fail. But a blow hardly less grievous had yet to fall. Mlle. de Lespinasse, on whose assistance she had leaned, had caught the secret of her success, and was forming a coterie of her own, an inner circle within Madame du Deffand’s. When the blind woman learned of her assistant’s treachery, she broke with her, and Mlle. de Lespinasse departed, carrying with her d’Alembert, adored of Madame du Deffand, and his friends, the flower of the flock.

Even then the dauntless old woman would not give up. The aged sibyl in her ‘tonneau’[99] at the Convent Saint Joseph could still attract the curious and the clever. Blind as she was, her ‘portraits’ of character were better than Madame Geoffrin’s,—who excelled in portraits,—and the clarity of her vision was surpassed only by the crispness of her phrasing. At sixty-eight, she had an eager curiosity about her own times[100] that was a stimulus to youth. To speak with her was to witness the triumph of mind.

But her heart was as dust and ashes within her. About her she could feel only duplicity and hatred;[101] she had no faith in man or in God. She considered her friends as those who would not kill but would look on while others killed.[102] The springs of happiness and hope had gone dry. And always the spectre of Ennui steals behind her, and casts its shadow over her withered soul. Literature no longer interests or amuses; she finds philosophy poisoned by affectation;[103] she is bored by all historians, and is glad when she can lay down the first volume of Gibbon.[104] She hears Gluck’s Orphée, and is bored. She hears The Barber of Seville, and is bored.[105] She reads the Iliad, and is bored.[106] There is nothing in her life that does not feel this blight.

And then, in the late evening of her days, a miracle occurred. The dry branch budded and bloomed. In the person of Walpole, with his chill though delicate cynicism (so like her own), romance burst into her life, and she knew love and the pain of love. Her passion for the Englishman twenty years her junior transcends all comparison. It has in it the tenderness of age without its resignation, and the insistence of youth without its joy. It wreaks itself in protestations, reproaches, and demands which it knows must be futile. In Madame du Deffand’s letters to Walpole, recently published in their entirety,[107] there is a strong undercurrent which moves relentlessly to tragedy—tragedy that is no less poignant because its protagonist is an old woman and its theme the progress of a slow despair.

To Walpole all this was a source of great uneasiness. Like most superior folk, he feared the world. He feared that letters might be intercepted, that Madame du Deffand might talk; that the story might become public; that he might become an object of ridicule—and ridicule was to him a hell. He urged upon Madame du Deffand the necessity of reticence. He was crushingly persistent. The aged woman did her best to smother her feelings, but she could not altogether smother her resentment:

J’ai une véritable amitié pour vous, vous le savez, et quoique vous vous en soyez souvent trouvé importuné, que vous ayez fait tout votre possible et même tout ce qui est inimaginable pour détruire cette amitié, je suis persuadée que vous n’êtes point fâché qu’elle subsiste.... Et comment est-il possible qu’un aussi bon homme que vous veuille tourmenter une si faible créature que moi, de qui vous ne pouvez jamais craindre aucun mal, ni qui puisse vous faire encourir aucun ridicule ni aucun blâme?[108]

Walpole’s letters to Madame du Deffand are fortunately not preserved; but one imagines that he was bored by this strain. To him Madame du Deffand was an aristocratic French woman, a match for him in wit, frankness, and cynicism, who could provide him with that social life which, like her, he affected to despise but could not abandon. He had admired her capacity for disillusion, and now she was the victim of an illusion, and he was the object of it. The situation was unusual.