Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/20

Rh here is the regular employment you could make of your week : Sunday and Thursday, dinner with Baron d'Holbach ; Mon- day and Wednesday, dinner with Mme. Geoffrin ; Tuesday, dinner with M. Helv^tius ; Friday, dinner with Mme. ISTecker. I do not mention the Sunday breakfasts of the Abbd Morellet ; those, I think, came a little later. MUe. de Lespinasse, hav- ing no means to give dinners and suppers, was punctually at home from five to nine o'clock, and her circle assembled every day during those hours of the " early evening."

What she was as mistress of her salon and as a bond of society before, and even after, the invasion and delirium of her fatal passion, all the Memoirs of the time will tell us. She was much attached to d'Alembert, illegitimate like her- self, who (like herself again) had proudly forborne to seek for rights which tenderness had failed to give him. D'Alem- bert was then lodging with his foster-mother, the worthy wife of a glazier, in the rue Michel-le-Comte, which was far from the rue de Belle-Chasse. A serious illness seized him, during which Mile, de Lespinasse took care of him, induced the doctors to order him to live in better air, and finally decided him to come to her. From that day they made one household, but in all honour and propriety, so that no one ever gossiped to the contrary. D'Alembert's life became much easier, and the respect paid to Mlle. de Lespinasse was thereby increased.

Mile, de Lespinasse was not pretty ; but through mind, through grace, through the gift of pleasing, Nature had amply compensated her. From the first day when she came to Paris she seemed as much at her ease and as little provincial as if she had lived here all her life. She profited by the edu- cation of the excellent society that surrounded her, although she had little need to do so. Her great art in social life, one of the secrets of her success, was to feel the minds of others.