Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/45

30 We must not exaggerate the character of this union, which was restricted solely, on the part of d'Alembert, to " lodging in the same house," in which there were ten other families, Mile, de Lespinasse always maintaining her separate suite of rooms.

The question here arises as to the nature of d'Alembert's feelings for his friend, " Oh ! you," he cries after her death, "whom I have so tenderly and constantly loved, and by whom I believed that I was loved." Elsewhere he speaks of his " heart which has never ceased to be hers." And yet in spite of these protestations of love, he rejects, in a letter to Voltaire, the very idea of his marriage : " The person to whom they marry me, in the gazettes, is in truth a most estimable person in character, and formed by the charm and sweetness of her society to make a husband happy. But she is worthy of a better establishment than mine, and there is between us neither marriage nor love, only reciprocal esteem and all the gentleness of friendship."

Member of the Academy of Sciences, and also of the French Academy, the perpetual secretary of which he soon became, and the recognized chief of the Encyclopedists, d'Alembert was not so bad a match as he chooses to say. The truth is that the love of poor dAlembert for his friend was never without a rival ; first, the Marquis de Mora, whose memory rent her soul with regret and remorse, and last, the Comte de Guibert, who, by the passion he inspired, brought her life to its close in weakness and misery.

When Mile, de Lespinasse, ceasing to be a dependent in the shadow of Mme. du Deffand, opened her rival salon in the rue de Belle-Chasse, she was thirty-two years old, with little or no beauty, but a face of astonishing mobility, on which could be read the emotions of her soul, with, above all, a suddenness of impressions, a vivacity and charm of