ment, aided by fashionable cynicism. Mme. du Deffand is always complaining to Voltaire of the "cynicism and lack of taste" in the writers of the day. Taste she possessed in perfection within her narrow limits, but can we absolve of cynicism a woman who repeats insistently—

. . C'est qu'il n'y a, à le bien prendre, qu'un seul malheur dans la vie, qui est celui d'être né. Il n'y a aucun état, quel qu'il puisse être, qui me paraisse préférable au néant.

But, after all, we are not called upon to imitate Mme. du Deffand's unskilful conduct of her life or to share her (perhaps inevitable) sécheresse de cœur ; we are to admire and to enjoy her wit and the purity of her prose style. This very cynicism and hardness, this incomprehension of all that we should call Romanticism, make her an excellent critic of all kinds of humbug. That eternal ne pas être dupe of the French sceptics made her very quick to pierce the weak point of pretentiousness. The solemn flatness of society in that wig and gig period about 1760 is admirably summed up in a few caustic words

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Il n'y a plus de gaieté, monsieur, il n'y a plus de grâces. Les sots sont plats et froids, ils ne sont point absurdes ni extravagants comme ils étaient autrefois. Les gens d'esprit sont pédants, corrects, sententieux. Il n'y a plus de goût non plus; enfin il n'y a rien, les têtes son vides, et l'on veut que les bourses le deviennent aussi. .

Naturally neither Diderot nor Rousseau, with their facile tears and their declamations and attendrissements, and their nature and virtue, could escape Mme. du Deffand's dislike. Even in these letters to Voltaire-but a fraction of the whole correspondence-we came across amusing little shafts at their expense

. le jeu naturel que M. Diderot a prêché a produit le bon effet de faire jouer Agrippine avec le ton d'une harengère.

Of Jean-Jacques she writes

C'est un plaisant ambition que de vouloir se rendre célèbre par les malheurs.

Voltaire's friends, the philosophes and the Encyclopédistes, found no mercy from her

...

Je ne saurais admettre pour législateurs des gens qui n'ont que de l'esprit, peu de talent et point du goût. . . . On voit clairement qu'ils n'ont d'autre but que de courir après une célébrité on ils ne parviendront jamais.

Again

Vos philosophes, ou plutôt soi-disant philosophes, sont de froids personnages: fastueux sans être riches, téméraires sans être braves, prêchant l'égalité par esprit de domination, se croyant les premiers hommes du monde, de penser ce que pensent tous les gens qui pensent; orgueilleux, haineux, vindicatifs; ils feraient haïr la philosophie.

The human comedy does not change much: the names of the various parts alter a little, the

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decorations are renewed, but the personages remain much the same. The philosophes, once libertins, transformed themselves into fanatics and "sectaries" in England; they have changed their names and invented a new kind of cant, that is all. No doubt they will create the same kind of mischief and misery their predecessors created, until such time as mankind learns a little common sense. And perhaps even now some cynical and bored old lady, with more wit than charity, is summing up the faults and follies of the age in casual letters destined to immortality. They will have to be very good to beat Mme. du Deffand's.1

1 "Lettres à Voltaire." Par Madame du Deffand. Introduction de Joseph Trabucco. Paris, 1922.

ΧΙ

LETTERS OF MME. DE MAINTENON

HE extraordinary career of Mme. de Maintenon

THI

provides by itself a sufficient excuse for the numerous books of extracts and partial reprints of her letters, though, strangely enough, no complete edition has yet been issued. Mme. de Maintenon is entitled to a small but honourable and permanent place as a writer of French prose.

Interest in her as a writer is always in danger of disappearing in our greater interest in her enigmatic personality and singular destiny. To be born in a prison and die the widow of Louis XIV, to spend the early part of life in dependence, in poverty, and the latter part at Versailles; to be granddaughter to the great Protestant leader Agrippa d'Aubigné and responsible in part for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes-these antitheses of fortune are too piquant and romantic to escape the most careless attention. Perhaps it is but human to feel only curiosity about Mme. de Maintenon, not sympathy or affection for her memory. Or it may

be only perversity. But she is far too prudent and virtuous and ultimately successful to be moving, in spite of her romantic vicissitudes; she is so much the perfect governess and cultivated attendant-a kind of Jane Eyre on a royal scale. She seems to have been born to conduct youth, age, and infirmity upon the paths of duty and reason, at no time of her life, not even when she was only Mme. Scarron or Françoise d'Aubigné, in the least yielding to weaknesses, however amiable. The numerous scandalous memorialists have been forced to spare her name. Mme. de Maintenon herself says somewhere that her youth was happy and gay, she described herself as gay by nature and sad by position": but whatever her youth may have been (and Sainte-Beuve, with something less than his usual gallantry, says he would not put his hand in the fire for her virtue) she appears to us now in all the platitude of her thirty years' subjection to her Royal husband. It is to no avail that we are told of her youthful charm and wit, that she was once a pretty girl, in fact; she seems to have taken on something of the imposing but wearisome grandeur of Versailles; she seems to have lost herself in that terrible task of amusing a King who was longer amusable," and as she says in a letter to Mme. des Ursins, "perishing symmetrically in obedience to the Royal whim. The disasters of

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no