Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand

Educated at a convent in Paris, she showed, along with great intelligence, a sceptical and cynical turn of mind. The abbess, alarmed at the freedom of her views, arranged that Massillon should visit and reason with her, but he accomplished nothing. Her parents married her at twenty-one years of age to her kinsman, Jean Baptiste de la Lande, marquis du Deffand, without consulting her inclination. The union proved an unhappy one, and resulted in a separation as early as 1722.

Madame du Deffand, young and beautiful, is said by Horace Walpole to have been for a short time the mistress of the regent, the duke of Orleans (Walpole to Gray, January 25, 1766). She appeared in her earlier days to be incapable of any strong attachment, but her intelligence, her cynicism and her esprit made her the centre of attraction of a brilliant circle. In 1721 began her friendship with Voltaire, but their regular correspondence dates only from 1736. She spent much time at Sceaux, at the court of the duchesse du Maine, where she contracted a close friendship with the president Hénault[?]. In Paris she was in a sense the rival of Madame Geoffrin, but the members of her salon were drawn. from aristocratic society more than from literary cliques. There were, however, exceptions. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Fontenelle and Madame de Staal-Delaunay were among the habitués. When Hénault introduced D'Alembert, Madame du Deffand was at once captivated by him. With the encyclopaedists she was never in sympathy, and appears to have tolerated them only for his sake.

In 1752 she retired from Paris, intending to spend the rest of her days in the country, but she was persuaded by her friends to return. She had taken up her abode in 1747 in apartments in the convent of Saint-Joseph in the rue Saint-Dominique, which had a separate entrance from the street. When she lost her sight in 1754, she engaged Mademoiselle de Lespinasse to help her in entertaining. This lady's wit made some of the guests, D'Alembert among others, prefer her society to that of Madame du Deffand, and she arranged to receive her friends for an hour before the appearance of her patron.

When this state of things was discovered Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was dismissed (1764), but the salon was broken up, for she took with her D'Alembert, Turgot and the literary clique generally. From this time Madame du Deffand very rarely received any literary men. The principal friendships of her later years were with the duchesse de Choiseul and with Horace Walpole. Her affection for the latter, which dated from 1765, was the strongest and most durable of all her attachments. Under the stress of this tardy passion she developed qualities of style and eloquence of which her earlier writings had given little promise. In the opinion. of Sainte-Beuve the prose of her letters ranks with that of Voltaire as the best of that classical epoch without excepting any even of the great writers.

Walpole refused at first to acknowledge the closeness of their intimacy from an exaggerated fear of the ridicule attaching to her age, but he paid several visits to Paris expressly for the purpose of enjoying her society, and maintained a close and most interesting correspondence with her for fifteen years. She died on the 23rd of September 1780, leaving her dog Tonton to the care of Walpole, who was also entrusted with her papers. Of her innumerable witty sayings the best known is her remark on the cardinal de Polignac's account of St Denis's miraculous walk of two miles with his head in his hands,--Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte.

The Correspondance inédite of Madame du Deffand with D'Alembert, Hénault, Montesquieu, and others was published in Paris (2 vols.) in 1809. Letters of the marquise du Deffand to the Hon. Horace Walpole, afterwards earl of Orford, from the year 1766 to the year 1780 (4vols.), edited, with a biographical sketch, by Miss Mary Berry, were published in London from the originals at Strawberry Hill[?] in 1810.

The standard edition of her letters is the Correspondance complète de la marquise du Deffand ... by M. de Lescure (1865); the Correspondence inédite with M. and Mme de Choiseul and others was edited in 1859 and again in 1866 by the marquis de Sainte-Aulaire. Other papers of Madame du Deffand obtained at the breaking up of Walpole's collection are in private hands. Madame du Deffand returned many of Walpole's letters at his request, and subsequently destroyed those which she received from him. Those in his possession appear to have been destroyed after his death by Miss Berry, who printed fragments from them as footnotes to the edition of 1810. The correspondence between Walpole and Madame du Deffand thus remains one-sided, but seven of Walpole's letters to her are printed for the first time in the edition (1903) of his correspondence by Mrs Paget Toynbee, who discovered a quantity of her unedited letters. See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vols. i. and xiv.; and the notice by M. de Lescure in his edition of the correspondence.

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.