Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/50

Rh to know what tone each string would yield before she touched it ; I mean to say that our minds and our natures were so well known to her that in order to bring them into play she had but to say a word. Nowhere was conversation more lively, more brilliant, or better regulated than at her house. It was a rare phenomenon indeed, the degree of tempered, equable heat which she knew so well how to maintain, sometimes by moderating it, sometimes by quickening it. The continual activity of her soul was communicated to our souls, but measurably; her imagination was the mainspring, her reason the regulator. Eemark that the brains she stirred at will were neither feeble nor frivolous: the Condillacs and Turgots were among them; d'Alembert was like a simple, docile child beside her. Her talent for casting out a thought and giving it for discussion to men of that class, her own talent in discussing it with precision, sometimes with elo- quence, her talent for bringing forward new ideas and vary- ing the topic — always with the facility and ease of a fairy, who, with one touch of her wand, can change the scene of her enchantment — these talents, I say, were not those of an ordinary woman. It was not with the follies of fashion and vanity that daily, during four hours of conversation, without languor and without vacuum, she knew how to make herself interesting to a wide circle of strong minds."

Grimm insists on very nearly the same traits. " She possessed," he says, "in an eminent degree that art so difficult and so precious, — of making the best of the minds of others, of interesting them, and of bringing them into play without any appearance of constraint or effort. She knew how to unite the different styles of mind, sometimes even the most opposed, without appearing to take the slightest pains to do so; by a word, adroitly flung in, she sustained the conversation, animating and varying it as she pleased.