ons of them. Madame du Deffand gave early proof that she shared to
the full this propensity of her age. While still a young girl in a
convent school, she had shrugged her shoulders when the nuns began to
instruct her in the articles of their faith. The matter was considered
serious, and the great Massillon, then at the height of his fame as a
preacher and a healer of souls, was sent for to deal with the youthful
heretic. She was not impressed by his arguments. In his person the
generous fervour and the massive piety of an age that could still
believe felt the icy and disintegrating touch of a new and strange
indifference. 'Mais qu'elle est jolie!' he murmured as he came away. The
Abbess ran forward to ask what holy books he recommended. 'Give her a
threepenny Catechism,' was Massillon's reply. He had seen that the case
was hopeless.

An innate scepticism, a profound levity, an antipathy to enthusiasm that
wavered between laughter and disgust, combined with an unswerving
devotion to the exacting and arduous ideals of social intercourse--such
were the characteristics of the brilliant group of men and women who had
spent their youth at the Court of the Regent, and dallied out their
middle age down the long avenues of Sceaux. About the middle of the
century the Duchesse du Maine died, and Madame du Deffand established
herself in Paris at the Convent of Saint Joseph in a set of rooms which
still showed traces--in the emblazoned arms over the great
mantelpiece--of the occupation of Madame de Montespan. A few years later
a physical affliction overtook her: at the age of fifty-seven she became
totally blind; and this misfortune placed her, almost without a
transition, among the ranks of the old. For the rest of her life she
hardly moved from her drawing-room, which speedily became the most
celebrated in Europe. The thirty years of her reign there fall into two
distinct and almost equal parts. The first, during which d'Alembert was
pre-eminent, came to an end with the violent expulsion of Mademoiselle
de Lespinasse. During the second, which lasted for the rest of her life,
her salon, purged of the Encyclopaedists, took on a more decidedly
worldly tone; and the influence of Horace Walpole was supreme.

It is this final period of Madame du Deffand's life that is reflected so
minutely in the famous correspondence which the labours of Mrs. Toynbee
have now presented to us for the first time in its entirety. Her letters
to Walpole f