VII
MADAME DU DEFFAND
We know her intimately through her multitude of letters, but we know her only as a blind, infirm old woman, dependent on the kindness of others for amusement, if not for support, and ready to depart at any time from the well-worn and tedious spectacle of flavorless existence, if it had not been for her utter uncertainty as to the world that lay beyond.
She had been very young, however, very young and very gay, as traditions tell us. Born into the most dissipated period of French social life, the regency of the first half of the eighteenth century, she was conspicuous for her charm and wit as well as for the irregularity of her conduct. She is said to have been loved by the regent himself. In any case, she was most intimate with him and with his favorites, and turned that intimacy to advantage by securing a pension which was of solid value to her in later life. She fascinated others besides the wicked. The great preacher, Massillon, was summoned by her friends to convert her in early youth. He talked with her very freely, but would make no comment except that she was charming, and when asked to prescribe for her case would suggest nothing but a five-cent catechism.
She was married for convenience, but most inconveniently to her and her husband both. Either he was too fast for her, or too slow, at any rate he was too dull. She left him, and returned to him, and left him again, and was adrift in the wide world.
It is important to note that with Madame du Deffand, as with some other French women, extreme freedom of living is quite compatible not only with great refinement of taste, but with a singular delicacy and sensitiveness of moral perception. She has an occasional coarseness of speech belonging to her age, but few people have been more alive to fine shades of affection, of devotion, of spiritual tact.
Nevertheless, her early life must be remembered, if we would understand her later. She herself says, “Oh, I should not want to be young again on condition of being brought up as I was, living with the people I lived with, and having the sort of mind and character I have.” Dissipation, even less innocent than hers, disorders life, strips it of illusion, takes away utterly and forever the charm of simple things.
With Madame du Deffand, at any rate, there was no illusion left, and in her gray old age the charm of simple things was gone and of complex also. If she could have detailed her chill philosophy to Rosalind, that child of dawn would have cried out even more than to the curious Jacques, “I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.” To this disillusioned lady the men and women of the age she lived in were either cynics or pedants, they were bold without force and licentious without merriment, they had little talent and a vast deal of presumption. But as far as her thought and her reading and her knowledge went, the men and women of other times were little better. Most were either fools or knaves and the few who were not were so painfully conscious of it that living with them was more of a burden than with the others. She has words more bitterly acrid than even La Rochefoucauld’s to designate the folly and emptiness and wickedness of life. “I do not know why Diogenes went looking for a man: nothing could happen to him worse than finding one.” And she sums it up in one terrible sentence. “For my part, I confess that I have but one fixed thought, one feeling, one misfortune, one regret, that ever I was born.”
As a general thing, however, her complaint is less violent than this and what impresses her in life is not so much its actual evil and misery as its intolerable ennui. I must ask the reader’s pardon for using the French word, which is, perhaps, by this time almost English. No equivalent exactly fits it. “Melancholy” suggests somewhat more of abstract reflection and “boredom” more of irritation with external circumstances. Both these are sometimes applicable, but one cannot get along without “ennui” in discussing Madame du Deffand.
This, then, is the deadly burden that life inflicts upon her. The great hours run by, immense, interminable, with nothing to fill them, nothing that inspires her, nothing that amuses her, nothing that distracts her even. The weary waste of time to come can be judged only by the barren memory of time past and that holds out neither encouragement nor hope. To be sure, she readily recognizes that the root of the trouble may be within. A certain lady fails to please her, “but she shared this misfortune with many others, for everything seems insupportable to me. This may very well be because I am insupportable myself.” Whatever the cause, the malady is always present and without cure. “I end because I am sad with no reason for sadness except that I exist.”
It might be supposed that, drifting always in such a dead fog of ennui, she might bore her correspondents, much more her readers among posterity. She does often. She would very much oftener, if she were not after all a Frenchwoman of the wittiest age of French social life, with the sparkle of French vivacity at the end of her pen. Feeble as she was, world-weary as she was, perhaps even in close connection with these conditions, she had an indomitable nervous energy, which responded in the most surprising way to social or spiritual stimulus. Horace Walpole speaks with admirable justice of her “Herculean weakness.” She found life dull. Yet out of the dulness she could weave the tissue of a correspondence with Voltaire in which the balance of brilliancy is not always on one side. Could we say more? She goes right to the fact in her letters, speaks vigorously, without tautology, or circumlocution. “I care nothing for perfection of style or even for finished politeness. I detest phrases and energy delights me.” With what verve and petulance does she express the emotion of the moment, grave or gay. “Quick, quick, quick, let me tell you about the supper of yesterday which worried me so for fear I should be dull, or crabbed, or embarrassed. Nothing of the sort. I never remember in all my life being younger, or gayer, or merrier.”