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Rh a time the mistress of the regent. She was afterwards reconciled to her husband, but it proved impossible for them to live together, and a second and final separation took place. Without heart and without enthusiasm, Madame du Deffand was incapable of any strong attachment, but her intelligence, her cynicism, and her esprit made her the centre of attraction to a circle which included nearly all the famous philosophers and literary men in Paris, besides not a few distinguished visitors from abroad. In 1752 she became blind, and soon afterwards she took up her abode in apartments in the convent of St Joseph in the Rue St Dominique, which had a separate entrance from the street. This became the frequent resort of such men as Choiseul, Bouflers, Montesquieu, Voltaire, D'Alembert, David Hume, and Horace Walpole. In 1764 the society was split into two parties by the defection of her companion Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse, who took with her D'Alembert and several others. Madame du Deffand had most affinity of nature with Horace Walpole, who paid several visits to Paris expressly for the purpose of enjoying her society, and who maintained a close and most interesting correspondence with her for fifteen years. She died on the 24th September 1780. Of her innumerable witty sayings probably the best, and certainly the best known, is her remark on the Cardinal de Polignac's account of St Denis's miraculous walk of two miles with his head in his hands, "II n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte."

The correspondence of Madame du Deffand with D'Alembert, Renault, Montesquieu, and others was published at Paris in 1809. Her letters to Horace Walpole, edited, with a biographical sketch, by Miss Berry, were published at London from the originals in Strawberry Hill in 1810. 

DEFOE, DANIEL (1661-1731), was born in London in the year 1661, in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate. Neither the exact date nor place of his birth is known, nor is his baptism recorded, probably because he was of a nonconformist family. Hardly anything is known of his ancestors; his grandfather, Daniel Foe, is said to have been a squire or wealthy yeoman at Elton, in Huntingdonshire (not Northamptonshire, as more generally stated), and to have kept a pack of hounds; but the authority for the former statement seems to be mainly traditional, and for the latter we have merely an anecdote in one of Defoe's newspaper articles, which is at least as likely to have been fiction as fact. Attempts have been made, but merely fancifully, to trace the name to Vaux, Fawkes, or even Devereux. As to the variation Defoe or Foe it is to be noticed that its owner signed either indifferently till a late period of his life, and that his initials where they occur are sometimes D. F. and sometimes D. D. F. Mr Lee's conjecture, that the later form originated in his being called Mr D. Foe to distinguish him from his father, seems not unlikely. It may be added that three autograph letters of his are extant, all addressed in 1705 to the same person, and signed respectively D. Foe, de Foe, and Daniel Defoe.

James Foe, the father of the author of Robinson Crusoe, was a butcher and a citizen of London. Of his mother nothing is known. Daniel was chiefly educated at a famous dissenting academy, Mr Morton's of Stoke Newington, where many of the celebrated nonconformists of the time were brought up. It is noteworthy that one of his school fellows suggested the unusual name of Crusoe. In after life Defoe frequently asserted the sufficiency of his education and the excellence of the methods observed by his teacher. Judging from his writings his stock of general information must have been far larger than that of most regularly educated men of his day; but it is probable that his attainments were in no particular line very exquisite or profound. With very few exceptions all the known events of Defoe's life are connected with authorship. In the older catalogues of his works two pamphlets, Speculum Crapegownorum (a satire on the clergy) and A Treatise against the Turks, are attributed to him before the accession of James II., but there seems to be no publication of his which is certainly genuine before The Character of Dr Annesley, the family minister, published in 1697. He had, however, before this (if we may trust tradition) played an active part in public affairs. He had taken up arms in Monmouth's expedition, and is supposed to have owed his lucky escape from the clutches of the king's troops and the law, into which not a few of his school-fellows fell, to the fact of his being a Londoner, and therefore a stranger in the west country. On January 26, 1688, he was admitted a liveryman of the city of London, having claimed his freedom by birth. Since his western escapade he had taken to the business of wholesale hosiery. At the entry of William and Mary into London he is said to have served as a volunteer trooper "gallantly mounted and richly accoutred." In these days he lived at Tooting, and was instrumental in forming a dissenting congregation at that place. His business operations at this period appear to have been extensive and various. He would seem both now and later to have been a sort of commission merchant, especially in Spanish and Portuguese goods, and at some time or other he visited Spain on business. Later we hear him spoken of as "a civet-cat merchant," but as he can hardly have kept a menagerie of these animals it is odd that no one has supposed that the civet-cat was the sign of his place of business (it was a very usual one) rather than the staple of his trade. In 1692 his mercantile operations came to a disastrous close, and he failed for £17,000. By his own account the disaster would seem to have arisen from relying too much on credit. His misfortunes made him write both feelingly and forcibly on the bankruptcy laws; and although his creditors accepted a composition, he afterwards honourably paid them in full, a fact attested by independent and not very friendly witnesses. Subsequently, he undertook first the secretaryship and then the managership and chief ownership of some tile-works at Tilbury, but here also he was unfortunate, and his imprisonment (of which more hereafter) in 1703 brought the works to a stand-still, and thereby lost him £3000. From this time forward we hear of no settled business in which he engaged. He evidently, however, continued to undertake commissions, and made his political visits to Scotland an occasion for opening connections of this kind with that country. In the last thirty years of his life business played but a subordinate part, though he seems to have derived more profit from it than from his earlier ventures. It was probably at the time of his troubles in 1692 that he had occasion to visit Bristol, where—according to a local tradition—he lay perdu for fear of bailiffs all the week, but emerged in gorgeous raiment on Sunday, whence he was known by the nickname of "the Sunday gentleman."

It was not as a business man that Defoe was to make his mark, though his business experiences coloured to some extent the literary productions to which he owes his fame. The course of his life was determined about the middle of the reign of William III. by his introduction (we know not how) to William himself and to other influential persons. He frequently boasts of his personal intimacy with the "glorious and immortal" king (epithets, by the way, to the invention of which he has considerable claim), and in 1695 he was appointed accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty, which office he held for four years. During this time he produced (January 1698) his Essay on Projects, one of the first and not the least noteworthy of his works. This essay contains suggestions on banks, road-management, friendly and insurance societies of various kinds, idiot asylums, bankruptcy, academies (in the French sense),