correspondence with Grimm, Galiani, and Voltaire. The
senseless follies of a cruel and worthless husband, who plunged her from
great wealth into extreme poverty, and of whom Diderot said that "he
had squandered two millions without saying a good word or doing a good
action," threw her into intimate relations with Grimm; this brought her
into the center of a famous circle. Her letters give us a clear but far
from flattering reflection of the manners of the time. She unveils the
bare and hard facts of her own experience, the secret workings of
her own soul. The picture is not a pleasant one, but it is full
of significance to the moralist, and furnishes abundant matter for
psychological study.

The young girl, who had entered upon the scene about 1725, under the
name of Louise Florence Petronille-Tardieu d'Esclavelles, was married at
twenty to her cousin. It seems to have been really a marriage of love;
but the weak and faithless M. d'Epinay was clearly incapable of truth or
honor, and the torturing process by which the confiding young wife was
disillusioned, the insidious counsel of a false and profligate friend,
with the final betrayal of a tender and desolate heart, form a chapter
as revolting as it is pathetic. The fresh, lively, pure-minded,
sensitive girl, whose intellect had been fed on Rollin's history and
books of devotion, who feared the dissipations of the gay world and
shrank with horror from the rouge which her frivolous husband compelled
her to put on, learned her lesson rapidly in the school of suffering.

At thirty she writes of herself, after the fashion of the pen portraits
of the previous century:

"I am not pretty; yet I am not plain. I am small, thin, very well
formed. I have the air of youth, without freshness, but noble, sweet,
lively, spirituelle, and interesting. My imagination is tranquil. My
mind is slow, just, reflective, and inconsequent. I have vivacity,
courage, firmness, elevation, and excessive timidity. I am true without
being frank. Timidity often gives me the appearance of dissimulation and
duplicity; but I have always had the courage to confess my weakness, in
order to destroy the suspicion of a vice which I have not. I have the
finesse to attain my end and to remove obstacles; but I have none
to penetrate the purposes of others. I was born tender and sensible,
constant and no coquette. I love retirement, a life simple and private;
nevertheless I have almost always led one contrary t