NOTES:

[Footnote 1: _Lives of the English Poets_. By Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
Edited by George Birkbeck Hill, D.C.L. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press,
1905.]




MADAME DU DEFFAND[2]


When Napoleon was starting for his campaign in Russia, he ordered the
proof-sheets of a forthcoming book, about which there had been some
disagreement among the censors of the press, to be put into his
carriage, so that he might decide for himself what suppressions it might
be necessary to make. 'Je m'ennuie en route; je lirai ces volumes, et
j'écrirai de Mayence ce qu'il y aura à faire.' The volumes thus chosen
to beguile the imperial leisure between Paris and Mayence contained the
famous correspondence of Madame du Deffand with Horace Walpole. By the
Emperor's command a few excisions were made, and the book--reprinted
from Miss Berry's original edition which had appeared two years earlier
in England--was published almost at once. The sensation in Paris was
immense; the excitement of the Russian campaign itself was half
forgotten; and for some time the blind old inhabitant of the Convent of
Saint Joseph held her own as a subject of conversation with the burning
of Moscow and the passage of the Berezina. We cannot wonder that this
was so. In the Parisian drawing-room of those days the letters of Madame
du Deffand must have exercised a double fascination--on the one hand as