society, and to her habits of life at different periods, there is a crowd of inaccu racies. The Editor of the present Volumes has been enabled to avoid these inaccuracies, and to supply many of the particulars wanting, from the large mass of letters, and other original papers bequeathed by Mad. du Deffand to Mr. Walpole, from many memoranda of his, dictated by her, and from the Editor's acquaintance with several persons who lived in intimacy with her during the last twenty years of her life; a period subsequent to the date of any of the letters published at Paris. It has not therefore been found necessary to alter, or to shorten, any part of the following account, written some time before the appearance of the French publication.

Marie de Vichy Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand, was born in 1697, of a noble family in the provincce of Burgundy. Her eldest brother, the Comte de Vichy Chamrond, after acquiring the rank of

Maréchal de Camp, in the French service, retired in the year 1743, on account of his health, to his estate of Chamrond, near Roanne, in that district of Burgundy called the Briennois. He had married a lady of good family, of the same province, of the name of d'Albon, by whom he had a daughter, and two sons, both in the army.

She had a younger brother in the church, the Abbé de Chamrond, who be came Trésorier de la Sainte Chapelle at Paris, and lived at Montrouge near that city. By their grandmother, a Duchesse de Choiseul*, they were connected, though distantly, by the ties of blood, with the Duc de Choiseul, so long prime minister in France; and it is on this account that Mad. du Deffand, in the course of the following letters, always calls the Duc and Duchesse de Choiseul mes parens, and by

* Marie Boutillier de Chavigny, wife of Cæsar

a sort of anachronism in their relationship, grand-papa and grand-mama. The Duchesse de Luynes, long a favorite attendant of the Queen of Louis XV, was Mad. du Deffand's aunt, and obtained for her, after she became blind, a pension of six thousand livres from the Queen, which she enjoyed till her death.

Brienne de Lomenie, Archbishop of Toulouse, and afterwards Cardinal de Lomenie, was her great nephew. The spirit of political intrigue, which distinguished his character, and of which Mad. du Deffand seems to have been early aware, at length succeeded in raising him to the administration of affairs, during the last struggles of the old government of France, and exposed him to the contempt he deserved for aspiring to such a situation, at such a moment*.

She mentions in her letters a sister, settled at Avignon, who died in 1769, with

* He was nicknamed by the populace of Paris the Cardinal de l'Ignominie.

whom she seems never to have had much connection. Her nephew, the Marquis d'Aulan, whom she sent for to Paris in the year 1778, was son to this sister. Mademoiselle de Chamrond, for so Mad. du Deffand was called before her marriage, was educated like other young Frenchwomen of fashion, in a convent at Paris. She was placed in that of La Madeleine de Trenelle, in the rue de Charonne. Among her papers are preserved several letters, addressed to her between the age of sixteen and nineteen, by a priest, who attended the pupils of this convent as confessor, or as they were then called directeur, which letters prove, that she had thus early entertained doubts upon religious subjects, which were unfortunately rather encreased than diminished by the zealous, but ill-directed arguments of the priest. Mr. Walpole says, that—“ her 66 parents, alarmed at her sentiments, sent "her the famous Massillon to talk to her.

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nor dazzled by his arguments, but de"fended herself with good sense, and the "prelate was more struck by her inge"nuity and beauty, than shocked at her heresy." He adds that, " from that "time till her death, at the age of

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eighty-three, she never affected scep"ticism, and always wished to be devout, as the state of the greatest happiness " even in this world." This happy state, however, from the mismanagement of her mind in early youth, and its subsequent want of all proper culture, she never attained.

From the frequent complaints she makes in her letters of the badness and neglect of her education, we must suppose that the instruction given to the pensioners of la Madeleine de Trenelle was not better calculated to form the mind, or to cultivate the understanding, than that of the other seminaries of the same kind, at that period. Indeed, she repeatedly expresses the regret, which every woman endued