btained this power of public good; and he
preferred living without it, and haunting, night after night, the
coteries of the old blue-stockings who kept open house for the evening
gossipry of the capital.

Nothing can form a stronger contrast to the general passion of the
French character for change, than its devotion to the same coterie for
half a century together. In the middle of the eighteenth century two
houses in Paris were especially the rendezvous of the talkers, idlers,
and philosophers of Paris. That some of those visitants were men of
remarkable ability, there can be no doubt. But this perpetual haunting
of the same coffee-cups, this regularity of trifling, this wretched
inability to remain at home for a single evening, is so wholly
irreconcilable with our English sense of domestic duties, of the
attachment of parents to their families, and of the exercise of the
natural affections, that we find it utterly impossible to attach any
degree of respect to the perpetual lounger at another's fire-side.
Madame Geoffrin had now succeeded to Madame de Tencin, as the receiver
of the coterie. Madame du Deffand held a kind of rival, but inferior,
coterie. The former had a house, the latter had only a lodging; the
former was good-humoured, amiable, and kind--the latter satirical and
cold; but both were clever, and, at all events, both received the
gossips, wise and foolish, of Paris. At the lodging of Madame du
Deffand, D'Alembert met Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, a species of
companion to Madame. She was the illegitimate daughter of a woman of
fashion, as D'Alembert was the son. The circumstance was too common in
Parisian high life, to involve any censure on the parents, or any
disgrace on the children; but it may have produced a degree of sympathy,
which suddenly rose to its height by their taking a lodging together!
Those things, too, were so frequent in France, that, except the laugh of
the moment, no one seems to have taken notice of the connexion; and they
continued to carry it on, as well received as ever, and holding their
evening coterie with undiminished applause.

"No one," observes the noble biographer, "whispered a syllable of
suspicion, respecting a connexion which all were fully convinced could
be only of the most innocent kind." This French credulity is too simple
for our credence. That a he and she philosophic pair should have lived
in the same apartments for a dozen years with perfect innocency, may
have