ULTRA-PHILOSOPHICAL SALONS--MADAME D'EPINAY
Mme. de Graffigny--Baron d'Holbach--Mme. d'Epinay's Portrait of Herself--Mlle. Quinault--Rousseau--La Chevrette--Grimm--
Diderot--The Abbe Galiani--Estimate of Mme. d'Epinay A few of the more radical and earnest of the philosophers rarely, if ever, appeared at the table of Mme. Geoffrin. They would have brought too much heat to this company, which discussed everything in a light and agreeable fashion. Perhaps, too, these free and brilliant spirits objected to the leading-strings which there held every one within prescribed limits. They could talk more at their ease at the weekly dinners of Baron d'Holbach, in the salons of Mme. Helvetius, Mme. de Marchais, or Mme. de Graffigny, in the Encyclopedist coterie of Mlle. de Lespinasse, or in the liberal drawing room of Mme. d'Epinay, who held a more questionable place in the social world, but received much good company, Mme. Geoffrin herself included.
Mme. de Graffigny is known mainly as a woman of letters whose life had in it many elements of tragedy. Her youth was passed in the brilliant society of the little court at Luneville. She was distantly related to Mme. du Chatelet, and finally took refuge from the cruelties of a violent and brutal husband in the "terrestrial paradise" at Cirey. La belle Emilie was moved to sympathy, and Voltaire wept at the tale of her sorrows. A little later she became a victim to the poet's sensitive vanity. He accused her of sending to a friend a copy of his "Pucello," an unfinished poem which was kept under triple lock, though parts of it had been read to her. Her letters were opened, her innocent praises were turned against her, there was a scene, and Cirey was a paradise no more. She came to Paris, ill, sad, and penniless.
She wrote "Les Lettres d'une Peruvienne" and found herself famous.
She wrote "Cenie," which was played at the Comedie Francaise, and her success was established. Then she wrote another drama. "She read it to me," says one of her friends; "I found it bad; she found me ill-natured. It was played; the public died of ennui and the author of chagrin." "I am convinced that misfortune will follow me into paradise," she said. At all events, it seems to have followed her to the entrance.
Her salon was more or less celebrated. The freedom of the conversations may be inferred from the fact that Helvetius gathered there the materials for his "De l'Esprit," a book condemned by the Pope, the Parliament, and the Sorbonne. It was here also that he found his charming wife, a niece of Mme. de Graffigny, and the light of her house as afterwards of his own.
A more permanent interest is attached to the famous dinners of Baron d'Holbach, where twice a week men like Diderot, Helvetius, Grimm, Marmontel, Duclos, the Abbe Galiani and for a time Buffon and Rousseau, met in an informal way to enjoy the good cheer and good wines of this "maitre d'hotel of philosophy," and discuss the affairs of the universe. The learned and free-thinking baron was agreeable, kind, rich, and lavish in his hospitality, but without pretension. "He was a man simply simple," said Mme.
Geoffrin. We have many pleasant glimpses of his country place at Grandval, with its rich and rare collections, its library, its pictures, its designs, and of the beautiful wife who turned the heads of some of the philosophers, whom, as a rule, she did not like overmuch, though she received them so graciously. "We dine well and a long time," wrote Diderot. "We talk of art, of poetry, of philosophy, and of love, of the greatness and vanity of our own enterprises . . . Of gods and kings, of space and time, of death and of life."
"They say things to make a thunderbolt strike the house a hundred times, if it struck for that," said the Abbe Morellet.
Among the few women admitted to these dinners was Mme. d'Epinay, for whom d'Holbach, as well as his amiable wife, always entertained the warmest friendship. This woman, whose position was not assured enough to make people overlook her peculiar and unfortunate domestic complications, has told the story of her own life in her long and confidential correspondence with Grimm, Galiani, and Voltaire. The senseless follies of a cruel and worthless husband, who plunged her from great wealth into extreme poverty, and of whom Diderot said that "he had squandered two millions without saying a good word or doing a good action," threw her into intimate relations with Grimm; this brought her into the center of a famous circle. Her letters give us a clear but far from flattering reflection of the manners of the time.
She unveils the bare and hard facts of her own experience, the secret workings of her own soul. The picture is not a pleasant one, but it is full of significance to the moralist, and furnishes abundant matter for psychological study.
The young girl, who had entered upon the scene about 1725, under the name of Louise Florence Petronille-Tardieu d'Esclavelles, was married at twenty to her cousin. It seems to have been really a marriage of love; but the weak and faithless M. d'Epinay was clearly incapable of truth or honor, and the torturing process by which the confiding young wife was disillusioned, the insidious counsel of a false and profligate friend, with the final betrayal of a tender and desolate heart, form a chapter as revolting as it is pathetic. The fresh, lively, pure-minded, sensitive girl, whose intellect had been fed on Rollin's history and books of devotion, who feared the dissipations of the gay world and shrank with horror from the rouge which her frivolous husband compelled her to put on, learned her lesson rapidly in the school of suffering.
At thirty she writes of herself, after the fashion of the pen portraits of the previous century:
