page of them the traces of a mind to which the whole movement of contemporary life was profoundly distasteful.  The new forces to which the eighteenth century gave birth in thought, in art, in sentiment, in action—­which for us form its peculiar interest and its peculiar glory—­were anathema to Madame du Deffand.  In her letters to Walpole, whenever she compares the present with the past her bitterness becomes extreme.  ‘J’ai eu autrefois,’ she writes in 1778, ’des plaisirs indicibles aux operas de Quinault et de Lulli, et au jeu de Thevenart et de la Lemaur.  Pour aujourd’hui, tout me parait detestable:  acteurs, auteurs, musiciens, beaux esprits, philosophes, tout est de mauvais gout, tout est affreux, affreux.’  That great movement towards intellectual and political emancipation which centred in the ‘Encyclopaedia’ and the Philosophes was the object of her particular detestation.  She saw Diderot once—­and that was enough for both of them.  She could never understand why it was that M. de Voltaire would persist in wasting his talent for writing over such a dreary subject as religion.  Turgot, she confessed, was an honest man, but he was also a ‘sot animal.’  His dismissal from office—­that fatal act, which made the French Revolution inevitable—­delighted her:  she concealed her feelings from Walpole, who admired him, but she was outspoken enough to the Duchesse de Choiseul.  ‘Le renvoi du Turgot me plait extremement,’ she wrote; ‘tout me parait en bon train.’  And then she added, more prophetically than she knew, ’Mais, assurement, nous n’en resterons pas la.’  No doubt her dislike of the Encyclopaedists and all their works was in part a matter of personal pique—­the result of her famous quarrel with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, under whose opposing banner d’Alembert and all the intellectual leaders of Parisian society had unhesitatingly ranged themselves.  But that quarrel was itself far more a symptom of a deeply rooted spiritual antipathy than a mere vulgar struggle for influence between two rival salonnieres.  There are indications that, even before it took place, the elder woman’s friendship for d’Alembert was giving way under the strain of her scorn for his advanced views and her hatred of his proselytising cast of mind.  ’Il y a de certains articles,’ she complained to Voltaire in 1763—­a year before the final estrangement—­’qui sont devenus pour lui affaires de parti, et sur lesquels je ne lui trouve pas le sens commun.’  The truth is that d’Alembert and his friends were moving, and Madame du Deffand was standing still.  Mademoiselle de Lespinasse simply precipitated and intensified an inevitable rupture.  She was the younger generation knocking at the door.