Madame du Châtelet and Madame d'Houdetot must for the present be deemed sufficient specimens of French poetical heroines;—it were easy to pursue the subject further, but it would lead to a field of discussion and illustration, which I would rather decline.[152]
Is it not singular that in a country which was the cradle, if not the birth-place of modern poetry and romance, the language, the literature, and the women, should be so essentially and incurably prosaic? The muse of French poetry never swept a lyre; she grinds a barrel-organ in her serious moods, and she scrapes a fiddle in her lively ones; and as for the distinguished French women, whose memory and whose characters are blended with the literature, and connected with the great names of their country,—they are often admirable, and sometimes interesting; but with all their fascinations, their charms, their esprit, their graces, their amabilité, and their sensibilité, it was not in the power of the gods or their lovers to make them poetical.
FOOTNOTES:
[148] Mémoires et Lettres de Madame d'Epinay, tom. 1. p. 95.
[149] M. Somariva is well known to all who have visited Paris, for his fine collection of pictures, and particularly as the possessor of Canova's famous Magdalen.
[150] See Lady Morgan's France, and the Biographie Universelle.
[151] Stanza 77, and more particularly stanza 79.
[152] In one of Madame de Genlis' prettiest Tales—"Les preventions d'une femme," there is the following observation, as full of truth as of feminine propriety. I trust that the principle it inculcates has been kept in view through the whole of this little work.