Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/52

Rh there. Chastellux owed his election in a great measure to Mile, de Lespinasse. In her last hours, already lying on her deathbed, she secured that of La Harpe. " M. de La Harpe " says Bachaumont in his Memoirs, "was one of her nurs- lings ; by her influence she opened the doors of the Academy to him who is now its secretary. This poet was the last of those whom she enabled to enter them." All power has its detractors, all royalty its envious carpers, and these cast great blame on Mile, de Lespinasse for caballing, so they said, in the interests of her friends and through the influ- ence of d'Alembert, to close the doors of the Academy to those who were not her friends. Dorat, whose style she did not like (and perhaps not his person), attributed to her the various checks his academic ambition had met with ; and he made himself the organ of these accusations in two come- dies entitled, "Les Proneurs" and "Merlin Bel Esprit." Society came very near seeing renewed the scandal of the famous comedy of "Les Philosophes," and Mile, de Les- pinasse only just escaped being acted on the stage during her lifetime by Dorat, as Eousseau had been by Palissot. With- out justifying Dorat, whose comic muse was otherwise very inoffensive, it cannot be denied that Mile, de Lespinasse played a very great part in all the Academic struggles, and that her devotion to the ideas of d'Alembert and the Ency- clopedists, often carried her too far. Grimm, who men- tions the reproach, contests its justice without denying its cause.

"Her enemies," he says," blamed her, very ridiculously, for being concerned in a variety of affairs which were not her business, and for having favoured by her intrigues that philosophic despotism which the cabal of the bigots accused M. d'Alembert of exercising over the Academy, But why should women, who decide everything in France, not decide