had
held at her feet the elite of the French world, at the age of
about threescore and ten, fell desperately in love with a man of
fifty--Horace Walpole. She who had never loved with her heart, but
only with her mind, then declared it better to be dead than not to
love someone. Although her actions and letters were pitiful in
the extreme, her epistles are invaluable for their incomparable
portraitures and keen reflections upon persons and events of the time.
She attracted Walpole by the possibilities that were opened up to
him by her position in society, and by her brilliant conversation,
in which she scoffed at the clergy and the philosophers, showing a
profound insight into human nature and the society of the time as well
as into politics. Their correspondence shows one of the most pitiful,
pathetic, and lamentable love tales in the history of society. He
looked upon her friendship as a most valuable acquisition by which
he was kept in touch with all the scandals and stories of society,
of which he was so fond, and she mistook that friendship for love.
He felt himself flattered in being the one preferred by such a
distinguished old lady of high society.

All critics are at a loss for the explanation of such a love in a
woman of seventy. Was it the result of the lifetime of disappointment
of a woman who had constantly sought love but had never found it? Was
it, thus, the hallucination of the childish old age of the woman who
was physically consumed by incessant social functions and all-night
reading? Mme. du Deffand sees in Walpole her ideal, and she gives
expression to her feelings, regardless of propriety; for she is
childish and irresponsible. To a certain extent, the same was true of
Mme. de Stael, but she was still physically healthy and young enough
to enjoy life and the realization of that which she had so long
desired--an ideal affection. In the case of Mme. du Deffand, the soul
was willing, but the body failed. Her emotion can scarcely be termed
love, but is rather to be designated as a mental hallucination, an
exaggerated intellectual affection bordering upon sentimentality--the
outgrowth of that morbid imagination developed from her long suffering
from ennui.

She was a woman destined to pass by the side of happiness without ever
reaching it. She hardly had enjoyed what may be called friendship; she
was always either suspicious of it and of her friends' sentiments, or
she herself broke off relations for s