ies, her salon in the Rue Saint Dominique was
long one of the chief resorts of philosophism. In 1753 she became blind,
but this made little difference in her appetite for society. She lived
like many other great ladies in a monastery. She died in 1780. As a
letter-writer Madame du Deffand was the correspondent of most of the
greatest men of letters of the time (Voltaire, D'Alembert, Henault,
Montesquieu, etc.). But her most remarkable correspondence, and perhaps
her most interesting one, was with Horace Walpole, the most French of
contemporary Englishmen. Their friendship, for which it is hard to find
an exact name, unless, perhaps, it may be called a kind of passionate
community of tastes, belongs to the later part of her long life. Madame
du Deffand is the typical French lady of the eighteenth century, as
Richelieu is the typical _grand seigneur_. She was perhaps the wittiest
woman (in the strict sense of the adjective) who ever lived[290], and an
astonishingly large proportion of the best sayings of the time is traced
or attributed to her. Nearly seventy years of conversation and a great
correspondence did not exhaust her faculty of acute sallies, of ruthless
criticism, of cynical but clearsighted judgment on men and things. But
she was thoroughly unamiable, purely selfish, jealous, spiteful,
destitute of humour, if full of wit. A comparison with Madame de Sevigne
shows how the French character had, in the upper ranks at least,
degenerated (it is worth remembering that Madame du Deffand was born
just after Madame de Sevigne's death), though it must be admitted that
the earlier character shows perhaps the germs of what is repulsive in
the second.

[Sidenote: Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.]

The third most remarkable lady letter-writer of the century,
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, was closely connected with Madame du
Deffand. She was indeed her companion, her coadjutor, and her rival.
Julie Jeanne Eleonore de Lespinasse was in reality the illegitimate
daughter of a lady of rank, the Countess d'Albon, who lived apart from
her husband, and the name Lespinasse was merely a fancy name taken from
the D'Albon genealogy. She was born, or at least baptized, at Lyons on
the 19th November, 1732. Her mother, who practically acknowledged her,
died when she was fifteen, leaving her fairly provided for. But her
half-brothers and sisters deprived her of most of her portion, though
for a time they gave her a home. In 1754 Madame du Deffan