d, to whom she
had been recommended, and who had just been struck with blindness,
invited her to come and live with her, which she did, after some
hesitation. For ten years the two presided jointly over their society,
but at last Madame du Deffand's jealousy broke out. Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse retired, taking with her not a few of the habitues of the
salon, with D'Alembert at their head. Madame Geoffrin seems to have
endowed her, and she established herself in the Rue de Bellechasse,
where D'Alembert before long came to join her. They lived in a curious
sort of relationship for more than ten years, until Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse died on the 22nd May, 1776. During this time she was a
gracious hostess and a bond of union to many men of letters, especially
those of the younger _philosophe_ school. But this is not what gives her
her place here. Her claim rests upon a collection of love-letters, not
addressed to D'Alembert. She was thirty-four when the earliest of her
love affairs began, and had never been beautiful. When she died she was
forty-four, and her later letters are more passionate than the earlier.
Her first lover was a young Spaniard, the Marquis Gonsalvo de Mora; her
second, the Count de Guibert, a poet and essayist of no great merit, a
military reformer said to have been of some talent, and pretty evidently
a bad-hearted coxcomb. To him the epistles we have are addressed. All
the circumstances of these letters are calculated to make them
ridiculous, yet there is hardly any word which they less deserve. The
great defect of the eighteenth century is that its _sensibilite_
excludes real passion. The men and women of feeling of the period always
seem as if they were playing at feeling; the affairs of the heart, which
occupy so large a place in its literature, show only the progress of a
certain kind of game which has its rules and stages to which the
players must conform, but which, when once over, leaves no more traces
than any other kind of game. To this Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is a
conspicuous exception. It has been said of her that her letters burn the
paper they are written on with the fervency of their sentiment, nor is
the expression an exaggerated one. Except in Rousseau and (in a
different form) in _Manon Lescaut_, it is in these letters that we must
look for almost the only genuine passion of the time. It is no doubt
unreal to a certain degree, morbid also in an even greater degree as
regards what i