'Astaque est le composé le plus singulier de la nature: la versatilité d'un esprit plein d'idées originales et de caprices, l'agitation de son cœur, l'ardeur de son sang, les mouvements de sa bile, la vivacité de son âme, la faiblesse de son corps, tout cela forme un individu qui suffirait pour composer séparément une demi-douzaine de caractères distinctement marqués, et dont l'ensemble présente l'être le plus extraordinaire que l'on puisse rencontrer dans la société. . . . Astaque a beaucoup d'élévation d'âme: la naissance et les richesses de ceux avec qui il vit ne lui imposent nullement; il se trouve avoir assez de l'un et de l'autre pour se placer sans façon au niveau de tout. Ajoutez qu'Astaque est bon, charitable, humain, colère et doux, vif et paresseux, ami chaud, ennemi généreux (si tant est qu'il ait des ennemis); impatient par tempérament, indulgent par réflexion, naïf un moment et dans un autre plein de saillies, jouissant peu, s'ennuyant beaucoup, faisant des projets délicieux pour s'amuser, n'en mettant aucun à exécution; il en a parlé, c'est assez.'

The English have been criticised for their lack of hospitality towards the refugees hurried to their shores by the Revolution, many of whom had opened their houses to the English in Paris, but Crawford has been spared the charge of ingratitude; he was overwhelmed to meet again the old coterie in England under such frightful circumstances, and lavished attention and affectionate care upon them. Letters from Talleyrand, the Comte de Verdreuil, the Comte de Pomblanc, and others, prove their appreciation of his thoughtfulness. His death in London in 1814 again called forth warmest expressions of attachment from Paris. Perhaps Crawford was better appreciated abroad, where he spent the greater part of his life, than at home, where he was accused of insincerity, affectation, and jealousy. Walpole and Crawford, separated by disparity in years if not in character, would not naturally have been intimate, but Madame du Deffand attempted to draw these two together; for would not unanimity in friendships form another link to bind Walpole to her?

But the prolonged visits of Walpole and Crawford were not isolated cases of international friendship. Indeed, the eighteenth century may be said to be peculiarly marked as an age of friendships. George Selwyn was the representative figure of this phase in England, Madame du Deffand in France. The connexion between English and French high society was closer at this period than before or since in its history. To be sure the attractions of Paris seemed. to be greater to the Englishman than those of London to the Frenchman; but if, then as now, the latter, attached to his own environment, seldom left home, England was the land

of his choice when he was led, by inclination or necessity, to travel.

At this period, when the French salons and the hotels of Saint-Germain were in their glory, Englishmen of wit and fashion constantly lived in Paris for long periods. During Burke's visit in 1773 he was often present at Madame du Deffand's supper parties, and even Wilkes found himself there. Her correspondents, too, included many well-known Englishmen besides those we have mentioned, such as Lord Bulkeley and Lord Holdernesse. In 1751 Lord Bath writes home of an evening at Madame du Deffand's. When the 'conversation fell upon England, they know,' he wrote, 'its history better than Englishmen themselves.' In one of her letters to Crawford-letters in general so demonstrative that Walpole's uneasiness might have abated had he had access to them--she translates verses Charles James Fox addressed to Mrs. Crewe, and tells of her pleasure in again seeing Fox:

6 J'ai été charmée de le revoir; je fis répéter quatre ou cinq fois son nom quand on me l'annonça, ne pouvant me persuader que ce fût lui; je le croyais en plein Parlement à la tête des Américains. M. de Beauvau entra chez moi un moment après qu'il y fut arrivé; je lui demandai s'il le connaissait, il me dit que non. "Eh bien! devinez qui c'est. C'est l'homme du monde," lui dis-je, "qui a le plus d'esprit et qui a fait le plus de folies." "Serait-ce M. Fox?" "Eh! oui, luimême. Je souperai ce soir avec lui chez les Necker, avec votre ambassadeur et ambassadrice; demain il soupera chez moi avec mesdames de Luxembourg, de Cambis et Boisgelin, et le chevalier de Boufflers."”'*

The next year Gibbon was in Paris, and she brings forward his name as a further inducement to Crawford to come to Paris :

'Nous avons ici M. Gibbon, qui y restera trois ou quatre mois. Je suis persuadée qu'il vous plaît; j'en juge par moi-même, je le trouve de la meilleure conversation; il n'est arrivé qu'avant-hier; j'ai déjà soupé deux fois avec lui, j'y souperai encore demain et aprèsdemain.'

And in later letters the writer reiterates that she finds in him beaucoup d'esprit,' but she understands why he is not better liked. Above all, George Selwyn must not be omitted from the number of English who were equally at home in Paris salons and English drawing-rooms, for he spent a part of each year in his early life in Paris, which he loved. He and Madame du Deffand were great friends; they, too,

* November 26, 1776.

wrote to each other, and his name often occurs in her letters to others, with his petit milord' and the little Maria Fagniani, his adopted Italian child: 'Je ne connais d'heureux dans ce moment que le Selwyn; on ne peut concevoir une 'passion aussi extravagante que la sienne, mais elle est très vraie.' She admired English women, and draws for Selwyn a charming portrait of the beautiful Lady Sarah Bunbury, who was as great a belle in Paris as in London. She found Mrs. Damer, probably in Paris on her way to or from Rome, infiniment aimable.' There is an admirable picture, too, of Lady Pembroke. Indeed, she made friends with all the English ladies of note who visited Paris.

But something more detailed must be said of the most agreeable of Madame du Deffand's friends. A stranger visiting Touraine is shown from the allées of the roof-garden at Amboise, where Francis I. liked to walk, across the silver Loire, a curious columnar building, but faintly to be seen. It is the Chinese pagoda built by the Duc de Choiseul, and now the only architectural remnant left of the magnificent estate of Chanteloup. A retreat sometimes of Madame du Deffand,† many of her letters were addressed to it, the place of exile which the Duchesse de Choiseul willingly entered, because she could here enjoy, undisturbed, the company of her too popular husband. For this was the pleasant land to which he was banished when, unwilling to join the party of Madame du Barry, the Duc de Choiseul refused to accede to the king's request that he should be reconciled to her, and where the spectacle-extraordinary in France, which had always loved her kings-was daily beheld of the Court running to Chanteloup to pay their respects to the disgraced minister. It is easy to imagine the life here, in the sunshine, the pretty, flat country watered by the Loire, the Cher, and the Indre, the laughing landscape of the pleasure-loving Rabelais, of which, indeed, he seems a type.

In the Duchesse de Choiseul Madame du Deffand had a friend better worth the name than any of the women with

* Frederick, fifth Earl of Carlisle.

Madame du Deffand is not at Paris. She has gone to pass a fortnight with her friends, the Duc and the Duchesse de Choiseul.' 'Letters of Lady Mary Coke,' vol. iv. p. 75.

In 1770. He had been made Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1750, and exchanged the same year to the post of Minister of the Marine, while his cousin, the Duc de Praslin, was given the ministry of Foreign Affairs, thus leaving the government practically in the hands of the Duc de Choiseul.

*

whom she was intimate. She has come down to us bright and perfect, standing forth a gracious and exquisite figure amid the too frequently tarnished portraits which form the gallery of the epoch. She was beautiful, clever, and good. She not only had the outward attributes of a perfect little model,' but she was also a model of propriety, of delicacy, tact, and womanly dignity. She married when very young a man who soon tired of the perfections of his wife, but all her life she cherished the hope of winning his affection, and after his death she retired to a convent to save money to pay his debts. Convent-bred, she felt the narrowness and inutility of her education, and set herself to the task of being equal to the position she was called upon to fill as the wife of a public man. So complete and successful was this process of self-education that at Rome, where the Duc de Choiseul was sent as ambassador, the charming young Frenchwoman was admired and courted as much for her mental attainments as for her beauty, and for her charm of character. Every one loved her, and she succeeded in holding to her ideal of conduct throughout a life spent in the gayest and most frivolous Court in Europe to an old age, when, absolutely alone in the world, she passed unscathed through all the terrors of the French Revolution. Madame du Deffand was a confidante in her endeavours to gain her husband's affection. In her letters, where are so plainly given the evidences of her sweet and strong nature, we gain an insight into this pathetic life-history. She begs Madame du Deffand to say if the Duc had spoken of her, what he had said since her last letter. Her pride in him was as great as was her passion: 'Avouons que c'est un excellent 'homme que ce grand'papa; † mais ce n'est pas tout d'être le meilleur des hommes, je vous assure que c'est le plus 'grand que le siècle ait produit.' ‡

The Duchesse de Choiseul was twenty-five years younger than Madame du Deffand; their friendship perhaps had an added warmth from this disparity in years. Just as at the same period there was a closer bond of affection between George Selwyn, the famous wit and beau, and the Earl of Carlisle, thirty years his junior, than existed for their more Walpole to Gray.

Madame du Deffand playfully called the Duc and Duchesse de Choiseul grandpapa and grandmamma; she was connected with the family through her maternal grandmother, who was the stepmother of the Duc de Choiseul.

May 13, 1771,

immediate contemporaries, so across the Channel in France between two celebrated women, the older as famous a wit and as popular, the younger also attractive and interesting and occupying a high position, the same unusual association is seen, and their correspondence opens up the same vista of uncommon minds in easy and familiar and unstudied intercourse, delightful to read in itself apart from its historical interest. Of a philosophical order of mind, the letters of the Duchesse de Choiseul reflect the intellectual subtleties of the time; to her, as to Madame du Deffand, was denied the solace of religious faith; unlike her, however, she did not ceaselessly torment herself with questions of a future state, but her more serene temperament found happiness and contentment in the enjoyment of nature and in service for those about her; timid and gentle, she yet knew well how to maintain her opinions and her dignity. She possessed the elements that were wanting in Madame du Deffand, and she found in her more powerful nature a natural opposite. M. Deschanels has charmingly struck the note of contrast between these two friends, and M. Weiss has written on the same point: Madame de Choiseul a dans 'le caractère le charme que son amie a dans l'esprit, et elle a 'montré dans sa conduite la justesse que l'autre avait seule'ment dans son style.'* Madame du Deffand held the right theory of life, the Duchesse de Choiseul practised it; and though her domestic life was not fortunate, she obtained happiness in simple healthy ways, and her sunny disposition, good mind and heart, made her beloved by everybodyexcept her husband.

The French abbés of the eighteenth century were often little of ecclesiastics. We all know how in the Abbé de Coulanges Madame de Sévigné found her trusted man of business, and a friend equally near to the Duc and Duchesse de Choiseul and to Madame du Deffand was the Abbé Barthélemy. A valued friend and adviser of the Duc at Court, who had rescued him from a precarious position, from the time of his marriage he lived with them. This representative eighteenth-century abbé, amiable, witty, agreeable, learned, mingling in the world and its joys and strifes, as well as pointing the way to heaven, turned from the brilliant intellectual life to which he seemed destined by

Essais sur l'Histoire de la Littérature Française, p. 347.

† Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716-1795), an Oriental scholar, author of 'Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grèce.'