of La Fresnaye, the
despairing lover who blew out his brains at her feet, leaving the shadow
of a crime hanging over her, with haunting memories of the Bastille,
recall the innocence of her own early convent days? Did she remember
some long-buried love, and the child left to perish upon the steps of
St. Jean le Rond, but grown up to be her secret pride in the person of
the great mathematician and philosopher d'Alembert? What was the subtle
link between this worldly woman and the eternal passion, the tender
self-sacrifice of Adelaide, the loyal heroine who breathes out her
solitary and devoted soul on the ashes of La Trappe, unknown to her
faithful and monastic lover, until the last sigh? The fate of Adelaide
has become a legend. It has furnished a theme for the poet and the
artist, an inspiration for the divine strains of Beethoven, another leaf
in the annals of pure and heroic love. But the woman who conceived it
toyed with the human heart as with a beautiful flower, to be tossed
aside when its first fragrance was gone. She apparently knew neither the
virtue, nor the honor, nor the purity, nor the truth of which she had so
exquisite a perception in the realm of the imagination. Or were some of
the episodes which darken the story of her life simply the myths of a
gossiping age, born of the incidents of an idle tale, to live forever on
the pages of history?

But it was not as a literary woman that Mme. de Tencin held her position
and won her fame. Her gifts were eminently those of her age and race,
and it may be of interest to compare her with a woman of larger talent
of a purely intellectual order, who belonged more or less to the world
of the salons, without aspiring to leadership, and who, though much
younger, died in the same year. Mme. du Chatelet was essentially a woman
of letters. She loved the exact sciences, expounded Leibnitz, translated
Newton, gave valuable aid to Voltaire in introducing English thought
into France, and was one of the first women among the nobility to accept
the principles of philosophic deism. "I confess that she is tyrannical,"
said Voltaire; "one must talk about metaphysics, when the temptation
is to talk of love. Ovid was formerly my master; it is now the turn of
Locke." She has been clearly but by no means pleasantly painted for us
in the familiar letters of Mme. de Graffigny, in the rather malicious
sketches of the Marquise de Crequi, and in the still more strongly
outlined portrait or