Madame du Deffand

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Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand
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Marie du Deffand

Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand (25 September 1696[1] – 23 September 1780) was a French hostess and patron of the arts.

Life

Madame du Deffand was born at the Château de Chamrond,

Paris, she showed great intelligence and a skeptical, cynical turn of mind. The abbess of the convent, alarmed at the freedom of her views, arranged for Jean Baptiste Massillon
to visit and reason with her, but he accomplished nothing. At twenty-one years of age and without consulting her, her parents married her to her kinsman, Jean Baptiste de la Lande, marquis du Deffand. The marriage was an unhappy one and the couple separated in 1722.

Madame du Deffand is said by

Madame de Staal-Delaunay were among the habitués. When Hénault introduced D'Alembert
, Madame du Deffand was captivated by him. She tolerated the encyclopaedists only for his sake.

In 1752 she retired from Paris, intending to remain in the country, but she was persuaded by her friends to return. She had taken up residence in 1747 in apartments in the Convent of Saint-Joseph in the rue Saint-Dominique, which had a separate entrance from the street. When she lost her sight in 1754, she engaged Mademoiselle de Lespinasse to help her in entertaining. This lady's wit made some of the guests, including D'Alembert, prefer her society to that of Madame du Deffand, and

Mademoiselle de Lespinasse received visitors for an hour before her patron appeared. When this was discovered, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was dismissed (1764), and the salon broke up, for she took with her D'Alembert, Turgot, and the literary clique. From this time Madame du Deffand very rarely received any literary visitors. The principal friendships of her later years were with the duchesse de Choiseul and with Horace Walpole, the latter becoming the strongest and longest-lasting of all her attachments. In this period, she developed qualities of style and eloquence of which her earlier writings had given little promise. In the opinion of Sainte-Beuve
the prose of her letters ranks with that of Voltaire as the best of that classical epoch, without excepting any even of the great writers.

Walpole refused at first to acknowledge the closeness of their intimacy from an exaggerated fear of the ridicule attaching to her age, but he paid several visits to Paris expressly for the purpose of enjoying her society, and maintained a close and most interesting correspondence with her for fifteen years. On her death, she left her dog, Tonton, to the care of Walpole, who also was entrusted with her papers. Of her innumerable witty sayings the best known is her remark on the

St Denis's
miraculous walk of two miles with his head in his hands--Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte (The distance doesn't matter; it is only the first step that is the most difficult.).

Correspondence

The Correspondance inédite of Madame du Deffand with D'Alembert, Hénault, Montesquieu, and others was published in Paris (2 vols.) in 1809. Letters of the marquise du Deffand to the Hon. Horace Walpole, afterwards earl of Orford, from the year 1766 to the year 1780 (4vols.), edited, with a biographical sketch, by Miss Mary Berry, were published in London from the originals at Strawberry Hill in 1810.

The standard edition of her letters is in the Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, vols. 9–10, edited by Wilmarth S. Lewis.

Sainte-Beuve
, Causeries du lundi, vols. i. and xiv.; and the notice by Lescure in his edition of the correspondence.

Notes

  1. .
  2. ^ The Château de Chamrond is now in ruins; its dovecote remains standing.[citation needed]
  3. ^ Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, edited by Wilmarth S. Lewis (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1937-1983.

References

External links