pretension, however
disguised beneath the graceful tyranny of forms. Her salon offers a sort
of compromise between the freedom of the philosophical coteries and the
frivolities of the purely fashionable ones. It included the most noted
of the men of letters--those who belonged to the old aristocracy and a
few to whom nature had given a prescriptive title of nobility--as
well as the flower of the great world. Her sarcastic wit, her clear
intelligence, and her rare conversational gifts added a tone of
individuality that placed her salon at the head of the social centers
of the time in brilliancy and in esprit. In this group of wits,
LITTERATEURS, philosophers, statesmen, churchmen, diplomats, and men of
rank, Mme. du Deffand herself is always the most striking figure. The
art of self-suppression she clearly did not possess. But the art of so
blending a choice society that her own vivid personality was a pervading
note of harmony she had to an eminent degree. She could easily have
made a mark upon her time through her intellectual gifts without the
factitious aid of the men with whom her name is associated. But society
was her passion society animated by intellect, sparkling with wit, and
expressing in all its forms the art instincts of her race. She never
aspired to authorship, but she has left a voluminous correspondence in
which one reads the varying phases of a singularly capricious character.
In her old age she found refuge from a devouring ennui in writing her
own memoirs. Merciless to herself as to others, she veils nothing,
revealing her frailties with a freedom that reminds one of Rousseau.

It is not the portrait of an estimable woman that we can paint from
these records; but in her intellectual force, her social gifts, and her
moral weakness she is one of the best exponents of an age that trampled
upon the finest flowers of the soul in the blind pursuit of pleasure and
the cynical worship of a hard and unpitying realism. Living from 1697
to 1780, she saw the train laid for the Revolution, and died in time to
escape its horrors. She traversed the whole experience of the women
of her world with the independence and abandon of a nature that was
moderate in nothing. It is true she felt the emptiness of this arid
existence, and had an intellectual perception of its errors, but she saw
nothing better. "All conditions appear to me equally unhappy, from the
angel to the oyster," is the burden of her hopeless refrain.