ne and yet no hours of the day are unoccupied.[2253] "The Duchess has
only two hours' time to herself and these two hours are devoted to her
toilet and her letters; the calculation is a simple one: she gets up at
eleven; breakfasts at noon, and this is followed by conversation, which
lasts three or four hours; dinner comes at six, after which there is
play and the reading of the memoirs of Mme. de Maintenon." Ordinarily
"the company remains together until two o'clock in the morning."
Intellectual freedom is complete. There is no confusion, no anxiety.
They play whist and tric-trac in the afternoon and faro in the evening.
"They do to day what they did yesterday and what they will do to-morrow;
the dinner-supper is to them the most important affair in life, and
their only complaint in the world is of their digestion. Time goes so
fast I always fancy that I arrived only the evening before." Sometimes
they get up a little race and the ladies are disposed to take part in
it, "for they are all very agile and able to run around the drawing room
five or six times every day." But they prefer indoors to the open air;
in these days true sunshine consists of candle-light and the finest sky
is a painted ceiling; is there any other less subject to inclemencies or
better adapted to conversation and merriment?--They accordingly chat and
jest, in words with present friends, and by letters with absent friends.
They lecture old Mme. du Deffant, who is too lively and whom they style
the "little girl"; the young Duchesse, tender and sensible, is "her
grandmamma." As for "grandpapa," M. de Choiseul, "a slight cold keeping
him in bed he has fairy stories read to him all day long, a species of
reading to which we are all given; we find them as probable as modern
history. Do not imagine that he is unoccupied. He has had a tapestry
frame put up in the drawing room at which he works, I cannot say with
the greatest skill, but at least with the greatest assiduity. . . . Now,
our delight is in flying a kite; grandpapa has never seen this sight
and he is enraptured with it." The pastime, in itself, is nothing; it is
resorted to according to opportunity or the taste of the hour, now taken
up and now let alone, and the abbe soon writes: "I do not speak about
our races because we race no more, nor of our readings because we do not
read, nor of our promenades because we do not go out. What, then, do
we do? Some play billiards, others dominoes, and others b