The flying sheets which
Grimm, largely aided by his complaisant friends, and especially by
Diderot, sent to his august Russian and German correspondents, were in
reality periodical summaries of the state of politics, society, letters,
and art in Paris, not different in subject and style from the printed
newspaper letters of the present day. They form in the aggregate a very
important work, whether looked at from the point of view of history, or
from the point of view of literature; but they are not, properly
speaking, letters. Of the letter-writers proper three women and three
men may be selected,--Mademoiselle Aisse, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse,
and Madame du Deffand; Voltaire, Diderot, and Galiani.

[Sidenote: Mademoiselle Aisse.]

Mademoiselle Aisse had a singular history. When a child she was carried
off by Turkish rovers, and sold at Constantinople to the French
ambassador, M. de Ferriol. This was at the beginning of the century. Her
purchaser had her brought up carefully at Paris as his property, which
no doubt he always considered her. But in his old age he became
childish, and Mademoiselle Aisse was free to frequent society to which
she had been early introduced. She met and fell in love with a certain
Chevalier d'Aydie, who himself (at a later date, for the most part,) was
a letter-writer of some merit. Her letters to him and of him constitute
her claim to a position in the history of literature. They display the
_sensibilite_ of the time in a decided form, but in a milder one than
the later letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. But there is something
in them more than mere _sensibilite_--a tender and affectionate spirit
finding graceful expression and deserving a happier fate. Mademoiselle
Aisse, like most other people of her time, turned devout, but earlier
than most. She died in 1733.

[Sidenote: Madame du Deffand.]

Madame du Deffand was a very different person. She was born in 1697, and
she distinguished herself when quite a girl, not merely by her beauty,
but by her wit and tendency to freethinking. She was married in 1718 to
the Marquis du Deffand, but soon separated from him, and lived for many
years the then usual life of gallantry. This merged insensibly into a
life of literary and philosophical society. Though Madame du Deffand was
not, like the wealthier but more plebeian Madame Geoffrin, and later
Madame Helvetius, a 'nursing mother of the philosophers,' in the sense
of supplying their necessit