Madame du Deffand’s generation had, indeed, very little in common with that ardent, hopeful, speculative, sentimental group of friends who met together every evening in the drawing-room of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.  Born at the close of the seventeenth century, she had come into the world in the brilliant days of the Regent, whose witty and licentious reign had suddenly dissipated the atmosphere of gloom and bigotry imposed upon society by the moribund Court of Louis XIV.  For a fortnight (so she confessed to Walpole) she was actually the Regent’s mistress; and a fortnight, in those days, was a considerable time.  Then she became the intimate friend of Madame de Prie—­the singular woman who, for a moment, on the Regent’s death, during the government of M. le Duc, controlled the destinies of France, and who committed suicide when that amusement was denied her.  During her early middle age Madame du Deffand was one of the principal figures in the palace of Sceaux, where the Duchesse du Maine, the grand-daughter of the great Conde and the daughter-in-law of Louis XIV., kept up for many years an almost royal state among the most distinguished men and women of the time.  It was at Sceaux, with its endless succession of entertainments and conversations—­supper-parties and water-parties, concerts and masked balls, plays in the little theatre and picnics under the great trees of the park—­that Madame du Deffand came to her maturity and established her position as one of the leaders of the society in which she moved.  The nature of that society is plainly enough revealed in the letters and the memoirs that have come down to us.  The days of formal pomp and vast representation had ended for ever when the ‘Grand Monarque’ was no longer to be seen strutting, in periwig and red-heeled shoes, down the glittering gallery of Versailles; the intimacy and seclusion of modern life had not yet begun.  It was an intermediate period, and the comparatively small group formed by the elite of the rich, refined, and intelligent classes led an existence in which the elements of publicity and privacy were curiously combined.  Never, certainly, before or since, have any set of persons lived so absolutely and unreservedly with and for their friends as these high ladies and gentlemen of the middle years of the eighteenth century.  The circle of one’s friends was, in those days, the framework of one’s whole being; within which was to be found all that life had to offer, and outside of which no interest, however fruitful, no passion, however profound, no art, however soaring, was of the slightest account.  Thus while in one sense the ideal of such a society was an eminently selfish one, it is none the less true that there have been very few societies indeed in which the ordinary forms of personal selfishness have played so small a part.  The selfishness of the eighteenth century was a communal selfishness.  Each individual was expected to practise, and did in fact practise to a consummate