During the time she held a leading social position, Madame de Choiseul proved to be in every way fitted for it. She herself declares she has no preference for such a life, complains that her hours are filled not occupied, longs for solitude and quiet, and when they come, as a result of political failure, accepts them with a sigh of genuine relief.
But all agree that for the manifold uses of society she had a singular aptness and charm. She was married when she was fifteen, and at eighteen went as ambassadress to Rome, where she made herself beloved by every one. She was not perhaps regularly beautiful, but her little figure had a fairylike grace and lightness, and her simple, dainty speech and manners doubled the attraction of her figure. “A Venus in little,” Vénus en abrégé, Voltaire calls her. Horace Walpole, who to be sure loved all the friends of Madame du Deffand, says of the duchess: “Oh, it is the gentlest, amiable, civil, little creature that ever came out of a fairy egg! So just in its phrases and thoughts, so attentive and good-natured!” Elsewhere he is even more enthusiastic: “She has more sense and more virtues than almost any human being,” and another brief touch gives a climax quite unusual with the cynic of Strawberry Hill: “The most perfect being I know of either sex.”
Nor was this grace and perfection of the tame order which effaces itself and merely warms others till they sparkle and flame. The lady had a fairy’s vivacity as well as a fairy’s daintiness. It is true, social embarrassment sometimes overcame her—most winningly. She had, says Walpole further, “a hesitation and modesty, the latter of which the court has not cured, and the former of which is atoned for by the most interesting sound of voice, and forgotten in the most elegant turn and propriety of expression.” She herself gives a charming account of a social crisis in which she was utterly at a loss what to do or say and could only stammeringly repeat the words of others, “Yes, Madam, no, Madam,—I think, that is, I believe—oh, yes, I am sure I agree with you entirely.”
But she had wit of her own, spirit of her own, courage of her own, and could find words in plenty when occasion really called for them. Madame du Deffand has preserved many of her clever sayings, as the comment on two gentlemen equally amiable, but different. “One is charming for the manner that he has and the other for the manner that he has not.”
The lasting evidence for us, however, of Madame de Choiseul’s vivacity is her letters. They exist in no such number as Madame du Deffand’s or Madame de Sévigné’s, but they yield to neither in ease, in variety, in grace and swiftness of expression. These qualities are equally manifest in her long description of the busy day of a prime minister’s wife,—the scores of petitioners, the hurry from one function to another, the tedious necessity of being something to everybody while nobody is anything to you,—and in little touches of the most pregnant and delicate simplicity. “What is there to say in the country when you are alone and it rains? We were alone and it was raining. This suggested talk of ourselves and, after all, what is there that we know so much about?” or again, “To love and to please is to be always young.” She could and did write French as perfect as Voltaire’s. But she did not hesitate a moment to twist grammar or syntax, when some unusual turn of thought required it. “I propose to speak my own tongue before that of my nation,” she says, “and it is often the irregularity of our thought that causes the irregularity of our expressions.”
But it was neither her beauty nor her wit that made the duchess so much admired and beloved. It was her sympathy and tenderness, her faculty of entering into the joys and sorrows of others and her pleasure in doing so, that drew all hearts to her. “She had the art of listening and of making others shine,” says a memoir writer of her own day. This is a social quality by no means contemptible. But the quality of sympathetic comprehension served for much more than social purposes. “I cannot bear the idea of suffering, even for persons indifferent to me,” she writes. This did not mean, however, that she fled suffering, but that she endeavored to alleviate it, by every means in her power. Where the suffering was mental or imaginary, she soothed and diverted it by sound counsel and gentle rallying, if necessary. Where it was physical, she gave her time and thought and strength to substantial relief.
Her dependents, her servants, the poor in all the region round, adored her. She gave them money, she gave them food, she gave them the sunshine of her presence and her cheerfulness. A servant whose work had been about the house was offered a better position outside. He refused it. “But why,” urged the duchess, “why? Your pay will be better, your hours shorter, your work lighter.” “Yes, madam, but I shall not be near you.” After the Revolution, when she had lost everything and was living in a garret, there came one day a knock at the door. She opened it to a rather prosperous-looking mechanic, and inquired what he wanted. “Madam, when I was a poor peasant, working on the roads, you asked me what I desired most in the world. I said, a cart and an ass to draw it. You gave them to me and I have made a comfortable fortune. Now it is all yours.”
If she was thus kind to those who were nothing to her personally, it may well be supposed that she was devoted to her friends. She had many of them and never felt that she had enough. Like all persons of such ample affection, she had her disappointments, with resulting cynicism, and once wrote: “It is well to love even a dog when you have the opportunity, for fear you should find nothing else worth loving.” But in general, though she was far from indiscriminate in her choice, she loved widely, and she repeats again and again that love is the only thing that makes life worth living, that love is life. When the bitter saying of Madame de Staël is reported to her, that she was always glad to make new acquaintances because she felt sure they could not be worse than those she had already, Madame de Choiseul rebels with the utmost indignation, declaring that she is not dissatisfied with any of her acquaintance and that she is enchanted with her friends. It seems, also, that her friendship was to a singular degree sympathetic and self-forgetful. So many of us see our friends’ lives from the point of view of our own and enter into their interests chiefly so far as they are identical with ours. But this lady has one beautiful and perfect word on the subject: “I have always had the vanity of those I love, that is my fashion of loving.”
One of her friendships we can study in minute detail and we find it to be without fault or flaw, that for Madame du Deffand. One friend was young, rich, beautiful, popular, driven in the rush and hurry of the great world. The other was old, feeble, blind, forlorn. Yet the friendship was as genuine and heartfelt on one side as on the other. Madame de Choiseul had the discernment to see Madame du Deffand’s fine qualities, her clear head, her tender heart, her magnificent sincerity; but she cherished her, as love does cherish, not from a mathematical calculation of fine qualities, but simply because it does and must. I love you, she repeats, I love you. I think of you daily, hourly. Tell me everything, as I tell you everything. Let there be no secrets and no shadows between us.