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;