It will be asked if this charming personage had no faults. Of course she had. She realized them herself, and so did others. It was even maintained that her very faultlessness was an imperfection and that she overcame nature so completely as to be not quite human enough. The Abbé Barthélemy himself, loyal and devoted as he was, and protesting that he is a monster of ingratitude, whispers gently to Madame du Deffand that his patroness had serious defects, to be sure chiefly injurious to herself, which resulted from her very excess of virtue, sympathy, and self-control. Elsewhere he murmurs that she is so busy with everybody it is sometimes hard to realize that she cares for anybody, and again that she thinks so much of friends who are absent that those who are present get very little attention.
Madame du Deffand, who was lonely, sensitive, and jealous, is much more free in her criticism. Persons overflowing with sympathy and kindness, like Madame de Choiseul, are always exposed to the charge of insincerity and the older friend expresses this, in the early days of their acquaintance, with the utmost bitterness. “She makes a great show of friendship. And as she has none for me and I have none for her, it is perfectly natural that we should say the tenderest things possible to one another.”
The passage of years wholly corrected this misapprehension. The blind, forlorn, love-thirsty dreamer came to know that there was no love in the world more loyal, more tender, more self-forgetful than that of this wonderful lady who might have had princes at her feet. Yet the solitary heart is not contented, can never be contented. Soothing, petting, rallying may calm it for the moment. It will never be still. “You cannot let go in your letters. You always say just what you want to say.” She writes grumblingly to Walpole of the duchess: “She wants to be perfect. That is her defect.” And again, “It is vexatious that she is an angel. I had rather she were a woman.” The sum total of the complaint recurs again and again in a phrase which Madame de Choiseul had most unfortunately invented herself. “You know you love me, but you do not feel it.”
Yet, after all, the lady was not so fatally angelic as to lose every appeal to frail humanity. It stung her to be dependent. It stung her to ask a favor of an enemy. It stung her to have any one ask a favor for her. With what wholesome vigor does she lash Madame du Deffand, who had innocently spoken a kind word for her friend to the wife of her friend’s chief political antagonist. “This is something I will not allow. This is something you absolutely must make right, and in the presence of the very persons who were witnesses to a piece of cajolery so unfitting under existing circumstances and so utterly foreign to my character.” And she adds, “the Abbé, who is all for gentle methods, will try to smooth this over. But, for my part, though I am sorry to hurt you, I don’t retract a word, because I have said what I feel.”
Also, she was capable of good honest hatred, when she thought there was occasion for it, and right in the family too. Her husband had a sister, Madame de Grammont, a big haughty Juno, if the duchess was a little Venus, and between the two there was no friendship. The duke hearkened to the sister much more than the wife liked. In short, they were jealous of each other and though they finally patched up an armed truce which age developed into a reconciliation, they never regarded each other with much cordiality. How vividly human is Madame de Choiseul’s account of her conduct when the duke had an attack of illness. “Though I hate Madame de Grammont, I sent her word, because I should wish her to do the same to me. What happened? She never thanked me, she never even answered me, but wrote to the duke to complain that he had not written and thus got me into trouble.”
So, you see, she knew the bitter emotions of life as well as the sweet, and was by no means exempt from any aspect of human frailty. Yet, although her soul was wide-open to emotions of all sorts, and though she herself passionately repeated that feeling was the only good of existence, was the whole of existence, she had, beside her emotions, an intellectual life singularly subtle, plastic, and varied, and full of interest to the curious student. She was apt to condemn reason as misleading, deceptive, and of little worth, but in demonstrating the point she indulged herself in reasoning of a highly elaborate and ingenious order. In fact, she was a child of the eighteenth century, and could not wholly escape its abstract tendencies. Speaking of her own letters, when a friend wanted to collect them for publication, she said, “to me they seem to be the writing of a raisonneuse.”
She came naturally by this argumentative tendency, for it was said of her father that he was too inclined to dissect his ideas and had a leaning toward metaphysics which he communicated to his wife, so that the daughter’s cradle may have been rocked by tempests of theoretical discussion. She herself declares that she was not educated at all and thanks heaven for it. For, she says, at least she was not taught the errors of others. “If I have learned anything, I owe it neither to precepts nor to books, but to a few opportune misfortunes. Perhaps the school of misfortunes is the very best.” She had, however, picked up a rather broad learning through keen attention and a love of books. She speaks of Pliny, Horace, Cicero, and other Latin authors, as if she knew them by heart. She reads the Memoirs of Sully with delight, though chiefly why? Because Sully’s situation reminds her of Monsieur de Choiseul’s. She deplores Madame du Deffand’s indifference to reading: “Books help us to endure ignorance and life itself: Life, because the knowledge of past wretchedness helps us to endure the present; ignorance, because history tells us nothing but what we already know.” Here you see the touch of the raisonneuse, to use her own phrase, the curious analyst, the minute dissector of her own motives and those of others. Madame du Deffand quotes a German admirer as saying of the duchess: “She is reason masquerading as an angel and having the power to persuade with charm.”
It is most fruitful to follow the gleaming thread of Madame de Choiseul’s analysis through the different concerns and aspects of human life.
Of art she apparently knew nothing whatever. Though herself a figure just stepped out of a canvas of Watteau, she never mentions him, nor any other artist, greater or lesser. We do not see that plastic beauty existed for her at all. Of her music we know only that she practised day and night to please her husband. Nature she never mentions in any aspect. All that she has to say of her long years in the country is that solitude is restful.
On the other hand, she shows much of herself and of her own mind in what she says of literature. As we have seen, she was a good deal of a reader, would have read much more, or fancied she would, if she had not had a thousand other things to do. And her judgment of books and authors is as keen and penetrating as it is independent. It shows further the strong, sound, moral bent of her disposition. She pierces Rousseau’s extravagant theorizing about nature with swift thrusts of practical sense, summing up her verdict in a touch of common truth expressed inimitably: “Let us beware of metaphysics applied to simple things.” And Rousseau himself she defined with bitter accuracy: “He has always seemed to me to be a charlatan of virtue.” Voltaire she judged with a singular breadth and justice of perception, appreciating to the full his greatness and his pettiness. “He tells us he is faithful to his enthusiasms; he should have said, to his weaknesses. He has always been cowardly where there was no danger, insolent where there was no motive, and mean where there was no object in being so. All which does not prevent his being the most brilliant mind of the century. We should admire his talent, study his works, profit by his philosophy, and be broadened by his teaching. We should adore him and despise him, as is indeed the case with a good many objects of worship.”