Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/511

Rh The Duchess of Burgundy (mother of Louis XV.) appears in this gallery under a less amiable aspect, on the whole, than that with which we have been wont to accredit her. Our guide freely bears witness to the charm of her natural graces, to that winsome, fairy-like manner which enchanted the court of Louis XIV. He thinks it a subject of regret that she was not spared to reign by the side of Fénélon's virtuous pupil, and thus happily defer the reign of their son, destined to the stigma of le plus méprisabie des rois. But he does not cloak her weaknesses for wine, and gaming, and such-like modes, at that day so indulgently regarded, nor omit to record the charge against her, that she abused the king's confidence by betraying French state secrets to an enemy of France, and instructing her father, the Duke of Savoy, in all the military designs of Louis and his marshals.

The busy, piquante little Duchess of Maine is capitally portrayed—one of the most anomalous and whimsical productions of the reign of the Great Louis. Almost a dwarf in person; in ambition unbounded, in spirit indomitable, in intrigue exhaustless. Her husband, timid and undemonstrative; herself, hardy, inquisitive, restless, imperious, fantastic. Everything by turns, from severe blue-stockingism to private theatricals and park bucolics. Now deep, for a dabbler, in the philosophy of Descartes, the Latin of Virgil and Terence, and the astronomy of Fontenelle; now making the welkin ring with the laughter of a well-dressed, neat-handed Phillis; now outwatching the night-watches in schemes of conspiracy—covering sheet after sheet of paper with polemics and strictures, designed to inspire a new Fronde against the regent of the new century. In her we are invited to behold a perfect model of the spoilt-child egoism, the fanciful despotism and coquettishness, of a princess of the blood in days of yore; gifted (or cursed, if you will) with a naïve incapacity for conceiving any other existence in the world than her own, and whose philosophy has actually attained the sublime conviction that the universe is but a dependence and extension of her dainty self: L'Univers, c'est moi!

Then again we have Horace Walpole's "dear old blind woman," Madame du Deffand—forgetting, as far as might be, her affliction, and trying to make all others forget it too, by dint of tact and agreeable manners; capricious and unromantic, a very débauchee d'esprit, frank and fastidious, fiery and fussy, quizzical and shrewd; in whose fanatical "fancy" for the lord of Strawberry Hill we are here taught to recognise a kind of motherly tenderness which had hitherto been objectless, and which all at once burst into life without knowing its real name. Her companion and rival follows. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse—for ten years her household confidante and bedside intimate, and ever afterwards divorced by mortal feud—a lady without name, without fortune, without beauty, who, by the sole charm of mental attraction, "created" a saloon surpassed by none in influence and brilliancy—whose life from early days was a romance, and something more—at whose bidding gathered together with unstinted homage such admirers as Turgot and Brienne, D'Alembert and Condorcet, and other renowned seceders from the established rites of the Convent of St Joseph. We have a full-length portrait of Madame d'Epinay, whose memoirs are pronounced, in idiomatic French, not a work, but an epoch—herself the social type of her day and generation—and therefine of a peculiar merit