[43] Letter to Gibbon, 30 September 1776; in Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works 2. 178.
[44] This function is admirably expressed by Professor Brunel in his account of Madame de Tencin (Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Littérature Française 6. 403) ‘[Elle les ramenait] sans cesse au ton léger qui convient, même en un sujet grave. Tel est bien le rôle d’une femme au milieu de ces têtes pensantes. Elle se tient audessus et au dehors du débat, qu’elle envisage au seul point de vue d’agrément, et dont elle règle la marche, toujours souriante, sans le laisser languir ni s’aigrir.’
[45] Letters 6. 414; 3 February 1766.
[46] Boswell’s Life of Johnson 3. 47.
[47] Madame Necker speaks of the ‘art perfectionné de l’exagération,’ in the letter to Gibbon cited above.
[48] Thus Marmontel: ‘Leurs entretiens étaient une école pour moi non moins utile qu’agréable et, autant qu’il m’était possible, je profitais de leurs leçons.’
[49] English visitors in Paris are satirized in two comedies by Samuel Foote, The Englishman in Paris (1753) and The Englishman returned from Paris (1757). In the former the leading character, Buck, is offered an introduction to ‘Madame de Rambouillet’; in the latter he comes home completely Frenchified.
[50] Letters 6. 332; 19 October 1765.
[51] Memoirs of M. de Voltaire. During Goldsmith’s sojourn on the Continent, Diderot and Fontenelle were still visitors at Madame Geoffrin’s.
[52] In Petit de Julleville’s Histoire de la Littérature Française, op. cit., 6. 404, Walpole, who must have had her character from Madame du Deffand, tells Mason that she was ‘a most horrid woman’ who ‘had great parts and so little principle that she was supposed to have murdered and robbed one of her lovers, a scrape out of which Lord Harrington and another of them saved her. She had levees from eight in the morning till night, from the lowest tools to the highest.’ Letters 10. 28; 13 March 1777.