in such a miserable captivity.  Was it his very coldness that subdued her?  If he had cared for her a little more, perhaps she would have cared for him a good deal less.  But it is clear that what really bound her to him was the fact that they so rarely met.  If he had lived in Paris, if he had been a member of her little clique, subject to the unceasing searchlight of her nightly scrutiny, who can doubt that, sooner or later, Walpole too would have felt ‘le fleau de son amitie’?  His mask, too, would have been torn to tatters like the rest.  But, as it was, his absence saved him; her imagination clothed him with an almost mythic excellence; his brilliant letters added to the impression; and then, at intervals of about two years, he appeared in Paris for six weeks—­just long enough to rivet her chains, and not long enough to loosen them.  And so it was that she fell before him with that absolute and unquestioning devotion of which only the most dominating and fastidious natures are capable.  Once or twice, indeed, she did attempt a revolt, but only succeeded in plunging herself into a deeper subjection.  After one of his most violent and cruel outbursts, she refused to communicate with him further, and for three or four weeks she kept her word; then she crept back and pleaded for forgiveness.  Walpole graciously granted it.  It is with some satisfaction that one finds him, a few weeks later, laid up with a peculiarly painful attack of the gout.

About half-way through the correspondence there is an acute crisis, after which the tone of the letters undergoes a marked change.  After seven years of struggle, Madame du Deffand’s indomitable spirit was broken; henceforward she would hope for nothing; she would gratefully accept the few crumbs that might be thrown her; and for the rest she resigned herself to her fate.  Gradually sinking into extreme old age, her self-repression and her bitterness grew ever more and more complete.  She was always bored; and her later letters are a series of variations on the perpetual theme of ‘ennui.’  ‘C’est une maladie de l’ame,’ she says, ’dont nous afflige la nature en nous donnant l’existence; c’est le ver solitaire qui absorbe tout.’  And again, ’l’ennui est l’avant-gout du neant, mais le neant lui est preferable.’  Her existence had become a hateful waste—­a garden, she said, from which all the flowers had been uprooted and which had been sown with salt.  ’Ah!  Je le repete sans cesse, il n’y a qu’un malheur, celui d’etre ne.’  The grasshopper had become a burden; and yet death seemed as little desirable as life.  ‘Comment est-il possible,’ she asks, ’qu’on craigne la fin d’une vie aussi triste?’ When Death did come at last, he came very gently.  She felt his approaches, and dictated a letter to Walpole, bidding him, in her strange fashion, an infinitely restrained farewell:  ’Divertissez-vous, mon ami, le plus que vous pourrez; ne vous affligez point de mon etat, nous etions presque perdus l’un pour l’autre;