Choiseul or Voltaire. Her letters to Voltaire are enchanting; his
replies are no less so; and it is much to be regretted that the whole
correspondence has never been collected together in chronological order,
and published as a separate book. The slim volume would be, of its kind,
quite perfect. There was no love lost between the two old friends; they
could not understand each other; Voltaire, alone of his generation, had
thrown himself into the very vanguard of thought; to Madame du Deffand
progress had no meaning, and thought itself was hardly more than an
unpleasant necessity. She distrusted him profoundly, and he returned the
compliment. Yet neither could do without the other: through her, he kept
in touch with one of the most influential circles in Paris; and even she
could not be insensible to the glory of corresponding with such a man.
Besides, in spite of all their differences, they admired each other
genuinely, and they were held together by the habit of a long
familiarity. The result was a marvellous display of epistolary art. If
they had liked each other any better, they never would have troubled to
write so well. They were on their best behaviour--exquisitely courteous
and yet punctiliously at ease, like dancers in a minuet. His cajoleries
are infinite; his deft sentences, mingling flattery with reflection,
have almost the quality of a caress. She replies in the tone of a
worshipper, glancing lightly at a hundred subjects, purring out her
'Monsieur de Voltaire,' and seeking his advice on literature and life.
He rejoins in that wonderful strain of epicurean stoicism of which he
alone possessed the secret: and so the letters go on. Sometimes one just
catches the glimpse of a claw beneath the soft pad, a grimace under the
smile of elegance; and one remembers with a shock that, after all, one
is reading the correspondence of a monkey and a cat.

Madame du Deffand's style reflects, perhaps even more completely than
that of Voltaire himself, the common-sense of the eighteenth century.