de Choiseul, and Madame la Maréchale de Luxembourg, whose youth had been stormy, but who was now softening down into a kind of twilight melancholy which made her rather attractive. This last, with one exception, completes his list. The one exception is a figure which henceforth played no inconsiderable part in Walpole's correspondence, — that of the brilliant and witty Madame du Deffand. As Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, she had been married at one-and-twenty to the nobleman whose name she bore, and had followed the custom of her day by speedily choosing a lover, who had many successors. For a brief space she had captivated the Regent himself, and at this date, being nearly seventy and hopelessly blind, was continuing, from mere force of habit, a decent friendship' with the deaf President Hénault. At first Walpole was not impressed with her, and speaks of her, disrespectfully, as an old blind debauchee of wit.' A little later, although he still refers to her as the old lady of the ( 6 6 il y a d'honnêtes gens à la cour et à la ville,' he writes to Madame de Monconseil. The Duke's end was worthy of Chesterfield himself, for he spent some of his last hours in composing valedictory verses to his doctor, which are said to have been pleins de sentiments affectueux? house,' he says she is very agreeable. Later still, she has completed her conquest by telling him he has le fou mocquer; and in the letter to Gray above quoted, it is plain that she has become an object of absorbing interest to him, not unmingled with a nervous apprehension of her undisguised partiality for his society. In spite of her affliction (he says) she 'retains all her vivacity, wit, memory, judgment, passions, and agreeableness. She goes to Operas, Plays, suppers, and Versailles; gives suppers twice a week; has every thing new read to her; makes new songs and epigrams, ay, admirably,1 and remembers every one that has been made these fourscore years. She corresponds with Voltaire, dictates charming letters to him, contradicts him, is no bigot to him or anybody, and laughs both at the clergy and the philosophers. In a dispute, into which she easily falls, she is very warm, and yet scarce ever in the wrong; her judgment on every subject is as just as possible; on every point of conduct as 1 One of her logogriphes, or enigmas, is as follows: — Quoique je forme un corps, je ne suis qu'une idée ; Plus ma beauté vieillit, plus elle est décidée : Il faut, pour me trouver, ignorer d'où je viens: The answer is noblesse. Lord Chesterfield thought it so good that he sent it to his godson (Letter 166). wrong as possible for she is all love and hatred, passionate for her friends to enthusiasm, still anxious to be loved, I don't mean by lovers, and a vehement enemy, but openly. As she can have no amusement but conversation, the least solitude and ennui are insupportable to her, and put her into the power of several worthless people, who eat her suppers when they can eat nobody's of higher rank; wink to one another and laugh at her; hate her because she has forty times more parts, and venture to hate her because she is not rich.' In another letter, to Mr. James Crawford of Auchinames (Hume's Fish Crawford), who was also one of Madame du Deffand's admirers, he says, in repeating some of the above details, that he is not ashamed of interesting himself exceedingly about her. Το say nothing of her extraordinary parts, she is certainly the most generous, friendly being upon earth.' Upon her side, Madame du Deffand seems to have been equally attracted by the strange mixture of independence and effeminacy which went to make up Walpole's character. Her attachment to him rapidly grew into a kind of infatuation. He had no sooner quitted Paris, which he did on the 17th April, than she 1 Walpole to Gray, 25 January, 1766. began to correspond with him; and thenceforward, until her death in 1780, her letters, dictated to her faithful secretary. Wiart, continued, except when Walpole was actually visiting her (and she sometimes wrote to him even then), to reach him regularly. Not long after his return to England, she made him the victim of a charming hoax. He had, when in Paris, admired a snuff-box which bore a portrait of Madame de Sévigné, for whom he professed an extravagant admiration. Madame du Deffand procured a similar box, had the portrait copied, and sent it to him with a letter, purporting to come from the dateless Elysian Fields and 'Notre Dame de Livry' herself, in which he was enjoined to use his present always, and to bring it often to France and the Faubourg St. Germain. Walpole was completely taken in, and imagined that the box had come from Madame de Choiseul; but he should have known at first that no one living but his blind friend could have written 'that most charming of all letters. The box itself, the memento of so much old-world ingenuity, was sold (with the pseudo-Sévigné epistle) at the Strawberry Hill sale for £28 75. When witty Mrs. Clive heard of the last addition to Walpole's list of favourites, she delivered herself of a good-humoured |