Nor was it by any means an untested friendship. Madame du Deffand had nothing to do but think of trouble, she was critically sensitive, knew her own weaknesses, and could not believe that anybody loved her. Often she intimates her complaints, her dissatisfaction, her jealousy. Madame de Choiseul is sometimes forced to treat her like the child she calls her. There are moments when a frank, outspoken word is necessary. But it is spoken with careful tenderness. “You think I love you from complaisance and ask you to visit me from politeness. I don’t. I love you because I love you. I will not say because you are lovable; for your fears, your doubts, your absurd hesitations annoy me too much for compliments. I don’t care about doing you justice. I want to do justice to myself. I love you because you love me, because I have my own interests at heart, and because I am absolutely sure of you.... I want to see you, because I love you, right or wrong.” And she did love her, in spite of all criticism and difficulty, with patient tenderness, thoughtful devotion, and infinite solicitude, till the very end.
Another friendship, of a somewhat different character, but of almost equal interest, is that for the Abbé Barthélemy, the clever, brilliant, sensitive scholar who was dependent upon the duchess’s bounty during a great part of his life. Here again, in the Abbé’s enthusiastic descriptions and comments, we see the thoughtful kindness, the unselfish devotion, the unobtrusive sympathy, which Madame de Choiseul lavished on those whom she had taken into her heart.
Sometimes this tenderness got her into difficulties. She added a child, apt and skilled in music, to her household, and made a pet of him. As he grew older, the boy fell in love with her, and she did not know what to do about it. Her pathetic account of her attempts to reason with him should be read in the original to be appreciated: “He could eat nothing, he could attend to nothing, and one day I found him seated at the clavichord, his heart overflowing in pitiful sighs. I called him, ‘my sweet child,’ to pet him and comfort him a little. Then his heart failed him and his tears flowed abundantly. Through a thousand sobs I could make out that he reproached me for calling him ‘my sweet child,’ when I didn’t love him and wouldn’t let him love me.... My courage broke too, I cried as much as he did, and to hide my tears I ran to find Monsieur de Choiseul and told him the whole story.”
Some gossips attempted to see in this pretty incident a suggestion, or at any rate a parallel, to the adventures of the page, Cherubino, in Beaumarchais’s “Marriage of Figaro,” written at a later date. Such slander was utterly unfounded. It is not the least of Madame de Choiseul’s charms that in an age when to have only one lover at a time was virtue and to have many was hardly vice, she is absolutely above the suspicion of having had any lovers at all. No doubt she knew that she was charming and liked to be admired. Madame du Deffand was perfectly right in reproaching Walpole for the singular lack of tact implied in his compliment to the duchess’s virtue. “Why did you tell her that a man would never think of falling in love with her? No woman under forty likes to be praised in that fashion.” But she herself declares that she was something of a prude and the testimony of many besides Walpole proves conclusively that she was not the opposite.
Moreover, she had the best of guarantees against waywardness of the affections, a profound, enduring, and self-forgetful love for her husband. Walpole cynically suggests that this love was too obtrusive to be sincere. In Walpole’s world such obtrusiveness may not have been fashionable. “My grandmamma has the ridiculous foible of being in love,” says Madame du Deffand. Some may not find it so ridiculous. At any rate, to the duchess her husband was the most important figure in the world and the obvious delight with which she welcomes political banishment because it means solitude and seclusion with him is as charming as it is pathetic.
Pathetic, because she did not get the same devotion in return. The duke loved her, respected her, admired her. His serious words about her are worthy of him and her both: “Her virtues, her attractions, her love for me and mine for her, have brought to our union a happiness far beyond the gifts of fortune.” But, though a prime minister, the duke was not always serious, in fact too seldom. He was a brilliant, versatile, gay, and amorous Frenchman, and while he loved his wife, which was a merit, he loved many other ladies, which was less so. “He does not mean to go without anything,” writes the duchess to Madame du Deffand, in a moment of unusual frankness. “He lets no pleasure escape him. He is right in thinking that pleasure is a legitimate end, but not every one is satisfied with pleasures that come as easily as his. Some of us cannot get them for merely stooping to pick them up.”
Yet, with all his weaknesses, it cannot be said that the passionate lover had chosen a wholly unworthy object, and even if she had, the breadth, the intensity, the nobility of her passion would have gone far to justify it. How tactful she is, with all her longing for affection! She does not intrude her feelings at the wrong place or time. She thinks more of giving than of getting. How exquisitely tender are the gleams we see, often through others, of the devotion which showed itself in a hundred little forms of the desire to please. “Your grandmamma is at the clavichord,” writes Barthélemy, with playful exaggeration, “and will remain there till dinner time. She will go at it again at seven and play till eleven. She has been doing this for two months, with infinite pleasure. Her sole object is to get so she can play to the duke without nervousness. To accomplish that result will take her about fourteen years longer, and she will be perfectly satisfied if at fifty she can play two or three pieces without a slip.”
Her own words are even more significant. “I want to grow young again, and pretty, if I could. At any rate, I should like to make your grandpapa think I am both one and the other, and as he has little here to compare me with, I may be able to deceive him.” Again, in as charming a bit of self-revelation as it would be easy to find, she writes to Madame du Deffand, with a lover’s passionate urgency: “Tell me, dear grandchild, did your grandpapa come back again Wednesday, after he had put me into the carriage? Did he speak of me? What did he say and how did he say it? I can’t help thinking that he grows a little less ashamed of me, and it is a great point gained when we no longer mortify those whom we would have love us.—You must admit that your grandpapa is the best of men; but that is not all, I assure you he is the greatest man the age has produced.”
If he was not, at least she did her best to make him so. While he was minister, she pulled every wire a loving woman can pull honestly, even stooping to court and caress Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of the king. When he was disgraced, she cherished his friends and fought his enemies, minimized his faults and blazoned his virtues, believed in him so intensely that she made others believe who were much more ready to doubt. After his death, she sold her possessions and lived in poverty to pay his debts and clear his memory. When she was urged to flee during the Revolution, she said she could not, or those debts would never be paid, and when she was imprisoned and in danger of the guillotine, her plea for release was still that she had a task to do on earth that was not done. She was set free and continued her efforts till her death.