Women of History Part 12

Was the daughter of Maupeon, president of one of the Chambers of Inquest, and, though far from being rich, was an acquisition to Pontchartrain, who was farther. One could scarcely be more _plain_ in appearance than Madame; but then, to make up, she was a big woman, with something of a grand air, which was not only imposing, but had a certain refinement about it. No wife of a minister, or any other, possessed more of the art of managing an establishment, of combining order with ease and magnificence, of adroitly warding off inconveniences by looking forward without showing solicitude, of making dignity harmonise with politeness--a politeness so measured and advised as put all the world at ease. She had a great deal of spirit, without any ambition to show it, and a complaisance which was devoid of hollowness or duplicity. If she happened to make a mistake, it was surprising with what quietness she could repair the error; but she possessed also great good sense, which enabled her to make a just estimate of people, and a general sagacity as regards things and conduct, which few men of the time could boast of.

Every one wondered that a woman _de la robe_, who had never seen the world but in Brittany, could in so short a time accommodate herself to the manners, spirit, and language of the court, becoming one of the best counsellors which one could find in cases of difficulty. True, she had too long imbibed the manners of the people not to show some small evidence of the contagion; but then it was all but unnoticed amidst the gallantry of a refined and charming spirit, which seemed always welling naturally from its source, accompanied by such grace of action that every one was delighted.

No person understood so well as Madame Pontchartrain the art of giving fetes. She had all the taste required, and all the invention, with a sumptuosity, too, on all sides; yet she never gave without reason and a good purpose, and she did all with an air perfectly simple and tranquil, without forgetting her age, her place, her state, her modesty. She was helpful to her relations; a trustworthy friend, effective, useful, true in all points, and pure at heart; delicious in the freedom of the country, dangerous at table in fixing you there, often very amusing without saying a word out of joint; always gay, though sometimes not exempt from humour. The virtue and the piety which she had exhibited throughout all her life increased as her fortune increased. What she gave in pensions well merited, what marriages she procured for poor girls, what she did for poor nuns when well a.s.sured of their vocation, what she deprived herself of to enable her to enable others to live, will never be known.

ELIZABETH HALKETT.

[1677.]

CONOLLY.

Born in 1677, the auth.o.r.ess of the celebrated ballad of "Hardyknute" was the second daughter of Sir Charles Halkett of Pitferrane. At the age of nineteen she married Sir Henry Wardlaw of Pitreavie in Fife, to whom she bore four daughters and a son.

She at first attempted to pa.s.s off the ballad of "Hardyknute" as a genuine fragment of an ancient poem, and caused her brother-in-law, Sir John Bruce of Kinross, to communicate the ma.n.u.script to Lord Binning, himself a poet, as a copy of a ma.n.u.script found in an old vault of Dunfermline.

The poem of "Hardyknute" was first published in 1719, and it was afterwards admitted by Ramsay into the "Evergreen," and for many years was received as an old ballad [a circ.u.mstance which has been founded on by some modern writers as sufficient to invalidate the claims of many of our "old ballads" to an origin beyond that of the date of Lady Halkett's successful literary fraud. Nay, several of these have been ascribed to this lady chiefly upon the internal evidence of identical words; but it seems to have been overlooked by these inquirers that Lady Halkett would naturally imitate the old ballads; and no doubt she did; so that the supposed proof may be successfully turned against the new theory.] The real authorship of "Hardyknute" was first disclosed by Bishop Percy in his "Reliques," published in 1755, and has since been established beyond a doubt [but there is no evidence beyond what has been mentioned that she wrote "Sir Patrick Spens," or any other of our so-called old Scotch ballads].

[Ill.u.s.tration: Drawn by J. Thurston. Engraved by W. Finden.

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGUE.

From an enamel Miniature by Zink in the possession of Charles Colville Esqr.]

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU.

[BORN 1690. DIED 1762.]

JEFFREY.

Lady Mary Pierrepoint, eldest daughter of the Duke of Kingston, was born in 1690, and gave, in her early youth, such indications of a studious disposition, that she was initiated into the rudiments of the learned languages along with her brother. Her first years appear to have been spent in retirement, and yet her first letters indicate a great relish for that talent and power of observation, by which she afterwards became so famous and so formidable. These letters were addressed to Mrs Wortley, the mother of her future husband, and, along with a good deal of girlish flattery and affectation, display such a degree of easy humour and sound penetration, as is not often to be met with in a damsel of nineteen, even in this age of precocity. "My knight-errantry," she says, "is at an end, and I believe I shall henceforth think freeing of galley-slaves and knocking down windmills more laudable undertakings than the defence of any woman's reputation whatever. To say truth, I have never had any great esteem for the generality of the fair s.e.x, and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the a.s.surance it gave me of never being married to any one among them." But, in the course of this correspondence with the mother, she appears to have conceived a very favourable opinion of the son. Her ladyship, though endowed with a very lively imagination, seems not to have been very susceptible of violent or tender emotions, and to have imbibed a very decided contempt for sentimental and romantic nonsense, at an age which is commonly more indulgent.

Married to Mr Wortley in 1712, she entered upon a gay life; but she does not appear to have been happy. We have no desire to revive forgotten scandals, but it is a fact which cannot be omitted, that her ladyship went abroad without her husband, on account of bad health, in 1739, and did not return to England till she heard of his death in 1761. Whatever was the cause of their separation, there was no open rupture, and she seems to have corresponded with him very regularly for the first ten years of her absence; but her letters were cold without being formal, and were gloomy and constrained when compared with those that were spontaneously written to show her wit or her affection to her correspondents.

A little spoiled by flattery, and not altogether "undebauched by the world," Lady Mary seems to have possessed a masculine solidity of understanding, great liveliness of fancy, and such powers of observation and discrimination of character, as to give her opinions great authority on all the ordinary subjects of practical manners and conduct. After her marriage, she seems to have abandoned all idea of laborious or regular study, and to have been raised to the station of a literary character merely by her vivacity and love of amus.e.m.e.nt and anecdote. The great charm of her letters is certainly the extreme ease and facility with which everything is expressed, the brevity and rapidity of her representations, and the elegant simplicity of her diction. While they unite almost all the qualities of a good style, there is nothing of the professed author in them; nothing that seems to have been composed, or to have engaged the admiration of the writer. She appears to be quite unconscious either of merit or of exertion in what she is doing, and never stops to bring out a thought, or to turn an expression, with the cunning of a practised rhetorician. Her letters from Turkey will probably continue to be more universally read than any of the others, because the subject commands a wider and more permanent interest than the personalities and unconnected remarks with which the rest of her correspondence is filled. At the same time, the love of scandal and private history is so great, that these letters will be highly relished as long as the names they contain are remembered, and then they will become curious and interesting, as exhibiting a truer picture of the manners and fashions of the time, than is to be found in most other publications.

Poetry, at least the polite and witty sort which Lady Mary has attempted, is much more of an art than prose writing. We are trained to the latter by the conversation of good society, but the former seems always to require a good deal of patient labour and application. This her ladyship appears to have disdained; and, accordingly, her poetry, though abounding in lively conceptions, is already consigned to that oblivion in which mediocrity is destined by an irrevocable sentence to slumber till the end of the world. Her essays are extremely insignificant, and have no other merit that we can discover, but that they are very few and very short.

Of Lady Mary's friendship and subsequent rupture with Pope, we have not thought it necessary to say anything, both because we are of opinion that no new light has been latterly thrown upon it, and because we have no desire to awaken forgotten scandals by so idle a controversy. Pope was undoubtedly a flatterer, and was undoubtedly sufficiently irritable and vindictive; but whether his rancour was stimulated upon this occasion by anything but caprice or jealousy, and whether he was the inventor or the echo of the imputations to which he has given notoriety, we do not pretend to determine. Lady Mary's character was certainly deficient in that cautious delicacy which is the best guardian of female reputation; and there seems to have been in her conduct something of that intrepidity which naturally gives rise to misconstruction, by setting at defiance the maxims of ordinary discretion.

MADAME DU DEFFAND.

[BORN 1697. DIED 1780.]

JEFFREY.

A lady who was left a widow, with a moderate fortune and a great reputation for wit, about 1750, and soon after gave up her hotel and retired to apartments in the Convent de St Joseph, where she continued to receive almost every evening whoever was most distinguished in Paris for rank, talent, or accomplishment. Having become almost blind in a few years, she found she required the attendance of some intelligent young woman who might read and write for her, and a.s.sist in doing the honours of her _conversazione_. For this purpose she cast her eyes on Mademoiselle Lespina.s.se, the illegitimate daughter of a man of rank who had been boarded in the same convent, and was for some time delighted with her selection. By-and-by, however, she found that her young companion began to engross more of the notice of her visitors than she thought suitable, and parted from her with violent, ungenerous, and implacable displeasure. Mademoiselle de Lespina.s.se, however, carried with her the admiration of the greater part of her patroness's circle; and having obtained a small pension from government, opened her own doors to a society no less brilliant than that into which she had been initiated by Madame du Deffand. The fatigue however, which she had undergone in reading the old marchioness asleep had irreparably injured her health, which was still more impaired by the agitations of her own inflammable and ambitious spirit; and she died before she had attained middle age, about 1776, leaving on the minds of all the most eminent men of France, an impression of talent, and of ardour of imagination, which seems to have been considered as without example. Madame du Deffand continued to preside in her circle till a period of extreme old age, and died in 1780, in full possession of her faculties.

Madame du Deffand was the wittiest, the most selfish, and the most _ennuye_ of the whole party. Her wit, to be sure, is very enviable and very entertaining; but it is really consolatory to common mortals to find how little it could amuse its possessor. This did not proceed in her, however, from the fastidiousness which is sometimes supposed to arise from a long familiarity with excellence, so much as from a long habit of selfishness, or rather from a radical want of heart or affection. La Harpe says of her, that it was "difficult for any one to have less sensibility and more egotism." With all this, she was greatly given to gallantry in her youth, though her attachments, it would seem, were of a kind not very likely to interfere with her peace of mind. The very evening her first lover died, after an intimacy of twenty years, La Harpe a.s.sures us "that she came to supper at a grand company at Madame de Marchius's, where I was; and that, speaking of the loss she had sustained, she said, 'Alas, he died at six o'clock, otherwise you would not have seen me here.'" She is also recorded to have frequently declared that she could never bring herself to love anything, though, in order to take every possible chance, she had several times attempted to become _devote_ with no great success. This, we have no doubt, is the secret of her _ennui_; and a fine example it is of the utter worthlessness of all talent, accomplishment, and glory, when disconnected with those feelings of kindness and generosity which are of themselves sufficient for happiness. Madame du Deffand, however, must have been delightful to those who sought only for amus.e.m.e.nt. Her tone is admirable, her wit flowing and natural; and though a little given to detraction, and not a little importunate and _exigeante_ towards those on whose complaisance she had claims, there is always an air of politeness in her raillery, and of knowledge of the world in her murmurs, that prevents them from being either wearisome or offensive.

PHOEBE BENTLEY.

[1700.]

c.u.mBERLAND.

The youngest daughter of the ill.u.s.trious Dr Bentley was the Phoebe of Byron's Pastoral. She was a woman of extraordinary accomplishments, and was the mother of the well-known Richard c.u.mberland, the most valuable part of whose early education was due to the taste and intelligence of this excellent woman. "It was," according to his account, "in these intervals from school that she began to form both my taste and my ear for poetry, by employing me every evening to read to her, of which art she was a very able mistress. Our readings were, with very few exceptions, confined to the chosen plays of Shakespeare, whom she both admired and understood in the true spirit and sense of the author. With all her father's (Dr Bentley's) critical ac.u.men, she could trace and teach me to unravel all the meanders of Shakespeare's metaphors, and point out where it illuminated or where it only loaded or obscured the meaning."

These were happy hours and interesting lectures to Richard c.u.mberland; and the effect was a sort of drama produced at twelve years, called "Shakespeare in the Shades," and composed almost entirely of pa.s.sages from that great writer, strung together and a.s.sorted with no despicable ingenuity.

MARQUISE DU CHATELET.

[BORN 1706. DIED 1749.]

PROFESSOR CRAIK.

At the head of the list of scientific ladies stands Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Chatelet, the French translator of Newton's "Principia." She was the daughter of the Baron de Breteuil, was born in 1706, and was married to the Marquis de Chastelet, or Chatelet, when very young. Voltaire became acquainted with her in 1733, and he has described what he found her to be in the memoir which he has left us of a part of her life. Her father, he says, had caused her to be taught Latin, and she knew that language as well as Madame Dacier. She had by heart the finest pa.s.sages of Horace, Virgil, and Lucretius; all the philosophical writings of Cicero were familiar to her. But her predominating taste was for the mathematics and metaphysics. There had rarely been united in any one more correctness of judgment, with more taste and ardour for the acquisition of knowledge; nor was she for all this the less attached to the world, and to all the amus.e.m.e.nts proper to her age and s.e.x.

Yet she had given up everything to go and bury herself in an old dilapidated chateau, situated in a barren and wretched country, on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine. She had, however, made this country house at Cirey an agreeable retreat for study and philosophical intercourse. Pleasant gardens, with which the marchioness had embellished it, a good collection of philosophical instruments which Voltaire formed, and an extensive library, enabled Maupertius, John Bernouilli, and other distinguished literary and scientific visitors, who sometimes came to spend a few weeks or months, both to enjoy themselves and to pa.s.s their time not unprofitably. Voltaire resided here for about six years. He taught the marchioness English, and, he says, at the end of three months she knew the language as well as himself, and was equally able to read Locke, Newton, and Pope. Italian she acquired with the same facility; Voltaire and she read several of the Italian poets together; and when Francesco Algarotti came to Cirey to finish his work, ent.i.tled "Newtonianismo par le Dame"--"Newtonianism for the Ladies"--she was able to converse with him in his own tongue, and to give him many valuable suggestions.

"We sought for nothing," continues Voltaire, "in this delicious retreat, except to cultivate our understandings, without taking any trouble to inform ourselves about what was pa.s.sing in the rest of the world. Our chief attention for a long time was given to Leibnitz and Newton. Madame du Chatelet at first attached herself to Leibnitz, and gave an explanation of a part of his system in a work written with great ability, which she called 'Inst.i.tutions de Physique.' She did not seek to decorate this philosophy with ornaments foreign to its nature; no such affectation belonged to the character of her mind, which was masculine and true. Clearness, precision, and elegance were the const.i.tuents of her style. If it has ever been found possible to give any plausibility to the notions of Leibnitz, it is in that book that it has been done." The "Inst.i.tutions de Physique" has received high commendation from the most competent authorities as well as from Voltaire. It is described as "a series of letters, in which the systems of Leibnitz and Newton are explained in a familiar style, and with a degree of knowledge of the history of the several opinions, and of sound language and ideas in their discussion, which we read with surprise, remembering that they were the production of a Frenchwoman, thirty years of age, written very few years after the introduction of the Newtonian philosophy into France. She takes that intermediate view between the refusal to admit the hypothesis of attraction and the a.s.sertion of it as a primary quality of matter, from which very few who consider the subject would now dissent. At the end of the work is an epistolary discussion with M. de Mairan, on the principle of _vis viva_--the vital energy, the metaphysical part of which then created much controversy."

Her translation of Newton's "Principia" was published at Paris in 1759.

It stands so high that it has been used by Delambre in his "History of Astronomy," whenever he has to make a quotation from Newton. Madame du Chatelet had been dead for ten years when the work appeared. Her life is supposed to have been shortened by her close application in preparing it, and she died at the age of forty-three.