Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/341

Rh her in a most contemptible light. Which of these accounts we are to credit, is rather difficult to decide; but the probable conclusion is, that Madame Dunoyer was not so good as she describes herself, nor so bad as her husband took pains to make the world believe.

After she left Switzerland, Madame Dunoyer made an excursion to England; of which nation she gives a long and curious account; and, upon the whole, a very candid one. Some time after, she visited Holland, and became acquainted with Voltaire, to whom she proved an implacable enemy. Her dislike arose from his endeavouring to convert her daughter, with whom he was passionately in love, to the catholic religion. Madame Dunoyer, who was a zealous protestant, highly resented this conduct, and forbade his ever visiting her daughter. He, however, persuaded the latter to consent to some stolen interviews; but their place of rendezvous was discovered, and her mother, by some complaint which she made against Voltaire, obtained an order to have him sent out of Holland. This he received from the hands of a French ambassador, who commanded him not to quit his apartment till the moment of his departure. Upon which he wrote to Mademoiselle Dunoyer a letter full of complaints and murmurs against her mother.

This, and other letters in the same style, fell into the hands of Madame Dunoyer, who, of course, grew much more exasperated against him. She accused him, perhaps with great reason, of not being so much in love as he pretended, and even of copying some of the most tender expressions, in his epistolary correspondence, verbatim, from the letters of Abelard and Heloise.

She is the author of a Recueil de Lettres Historiques et