Let us change the strain:  stilled be the mournful note on which we have rested too long.  What have wits and beaux and men of society to do with poets and beggars?  Behold, Horace, when he has written his monitory letter, packs up for Paris.  Let us follow him there, and see him in the very centre of his pleasures—­in the salon of La Marquise du Deffand.

Horace Walpole had perfected his education, as a fine gentleman, by his intimacy with Madame Geoffrin, to whom Lady Hervey had introduced him.  She called him le nouveau Richelieu; and Horace was sensible of so great a compliment from a woman at once ’spirituelle and pieuse’—­a combination rare in France.  Nevertheless, she had the national views of matrimony.  ‘What have you done, Madame,’ said a foreigner to her, ’with the poor man I used to see here, who never spoke a word?’

’Ah, mon Dieu! was the reply, ‘that was my husband:  he is dead.’  She spoke in the same tone as if she had been specifying the last new opera, or referring to the latest work in vogue:  things just passed away.

The Marquise du Deffaud was a very different personage to Madame Geoffrin, whose great enemy she was.  When Horace Walpole first entered into the society of the Marquise, she was stone blind, and old; but retained not only her wit, and her memory, but her passions.  Passions, like artificial flowers, are unbecoming to age:  and those of the witty, atheistical Marquise are almost revolting.  Scandal still attached her name to that of Henault, of whom Voltaire wrote the epitaph beginning

  ’Henault, fameus par vos soupers
  Et votre “chronologie,"’ &c.

Henault was for many years deaf; and, during the whole of his life, disagreeable.  There was something farcical in the old man’s receptions on his death-bed; whilst, amongst the rest of the company came Madame du Deffand, a blind old woman of seventy, who, bawling in his ear, aroused the lethargic man, by inquiring after a former rival of hers, Madame de Castelmaron—­about whom he went on babbling until death stopped his voice.

She was seventy years of age when Horace Walpole, at fifty, became her passion.  She was poor and disreputable, and even the high position of having been mistress to the regent could not save her from being decried by a large portion of that society which centered round the bel esprit.  ‘She was,’ observes the biographer of Horace Walpole (the lamented author of the ‘Crescent and the Cross,’) ’always gay, always charming—­everything but a Christian.’  The loss of her eyesight did not impair the remains of her beauty; her replies, her compliments, were brilliant; even from one whose best organs of expression were mute.