, he ordered the
proof-sheets of a forthcoming book, about which there had been some
disagreement among the censors of the press, to be put into his
carriage, so that he might decide for himself what suppressions it might
be necessary to make. 'Je m'ennuie en route; je lirai ces volumes, et
j'ecrirai de Mayence ce qu'il y aura a faire.' The volumes thus chosen
to beguile the imperial leisure between Paris and Mayence contained the
famous correspondence of Madame du Deffand with Horace Walpole. By the
Emperor's command a few excisions were made, and the book--reprinted
from Miss Berry's original edition which had appeared two years earlier
in England--was published almost at once. The sensation in Paris was
immense; the excitement of the Russian campaign itself was half
forgotten; and for some time the blind old inhabitant of the Convent of
Saint Joseph held her own as a subject of conversation with the burning
of Moscow and the passage of the Berezina. We cannot wonder that this
was so. In the Parisian drawing-room of those days the letters of Madame
du Deffand must have exercised a double fascination--on the one hand as
a mine of gossip about numberless persons and events still familiar to
many a living memory, and, on the other, as a detailed and brilliant
record of a state of society which had already ceased to be actual and
become historical. The letters were hardly more than thirty years old;
but the world which they depicted in all its intensity and all its
singularity--the world of the old regime--had vanished for ever into
limbo. Between it and the eager readers of the First Empire a gulf was
fixed--a narrow gulf, but a deep one, still hot and sulphurous with the
volcanic fires of the Revolution. Since then a century has passed; the
gulf has widened; and the vision which these curious letters show us
to-day seems hardly less remote--from some points of view, indeed, even
more--than that which is revealed to us in the Memoirs of Cellini or the
correspondence of Cicero. Yet the vision is not simply one of a strange
and dead antiquity: there is a personal and human element in the letters
which gives them a more poignant interest, and brings them close to
ourselves. The soul of man is not subject to the rumour of periods; and
these pages, impregnated though they be with the abolished life of the
eighteenth century, can never be out of date.

A fortunate chance enables us now, for the first time, to appreciate
them i