and all the intellectual leaders of Parisian society had unhesitatingly
ranged themselves. But that quarrel was itself far more a symptom of a
deeply rooted spiritual antipathy than a mere vulgar struggle for
influence between two rival _salonnières_. There are indications that,
even before it took place, the elder woman's friendship for d'Alembert
was giving way under the strain of her scorn for his advanced views and
her hatred of his proselytising cast of mind. 'Il y a de certains
articles,' she complained to Voltaire in 1763--a year before the final
estrangement--'qui sont devenus pour lui affaires de parti, et sur
lesquels je ne lui trouve pas le sens commun.' The truth is that
d'Alembert and his friends were moving, and Madame du Deffand was
standing still. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse simply precipitated and
intensified an inevitable rupture. She was the younger generation
knocking at the door.

Madame du Deffand's generation had, indeed, very little in common with
that ardent, hopeful, speculative, sentimental group of friends who met
together every evening in the drawing-room of Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse. Born at the close of the seventeenth century, she had come
into the world in the brilliant days of the Regent, whose witty and
licentious reign had suddenly dissipated the atmosphere of gloom and
bigotry imposed upon society by the moribund Court of Louis XIV. For a
fortnight (so she confessed to Walpole) she was actually the Regent's
mistress; and a fortnight, in those days, was a considerable time. Then
she became the intimate friend of Madame de Prie--the singular woman
who, for a moment, on the Regent's death, during the government of M. le
Duc, controlled the destinies of France, and who committed suicide when
that amusement was denied her. During her early middle age Madame du
Deffand was one of the principal figures in the palace of Sceaux, where
the Duchesse du Maine, the grand-daughter of the great Condé and the