Mme. Geoffrin was always at home in the evening, and there were simple little suppers to which a few women were invited. The fare was usually little more than "a chicken, some spinach, and omelet." Among the most frequent guests were the charming, witty, and spirituelle Comtesse d'Egmont, daughter of the Duc de Richelieu, who added to the vivacious and elegant manners of her father an indefinable grace of her own, and a vein of sentiment that was doubtless deepened by her sad little romance; the Marquise de Duras, more dignified and discreet; and the beautiful Comtesse de Brionne, "a Venus who resembled Minerva." These women, with others who came there, were intellectual complements of the men; some of them gay and not without serious faults, but adding beauty, rank, elegance, and the delicate tone of esprit which made this circle so famous that it was thought worth while to have its sayings and doings chronicled at Berlin and St.
Petersburg. Perhaps its influence was the more insidious and far reaching because of its polished moderation. The "let us be agreeable" of Mme. Geoffrin was a potent talisman.
Among the guests at one time was Stanislas Poniatowski, afterwards King of Poland. Hearing that he was about to be imprisoned by his creditors, Mme. Geoffrin came forward and paid his debts. "When I make a statue of friendship, I shall give it your features," he said to her; "this divinity is the mother of charity." On his elevation to the throne he wrote to her, "Maman, your son is king. Come and see him." This led to her famous journey when nearly seventy years of age. It was a series of triumphs at which no one was more surprised than herself, and they were all due, she modestly says, "to a few mediocre dinners and some petits soupers." One can readily pardon her for feeling flattered, when the emperor alights from his carriage on the public promenade at Vienna and pays her some pretty compliments, "just as if he had been at one of our little Wednesday suppers."
There is a charm in the simple naivete with which she tells her friends how cordially Maria Theresa receives her at Schonbrunn, and she does not forget to add that the empress said she had the most beautiful complexion in the world. She repeats quite naturally, and with a slight touch of vanity perhaps, the fine speeches made to her by the "adorable Prince Galitzin" and Prince Kaunitz, "the first minister in Europe," both of whom entertained her. But she would have been more than a woman to have met all this honor with indifference. No wonder she believes herself to be dreaming. "I am known here much better than in the Rue St.
Honore," she writes, "and in a fashion the most flattering. My journey has made an incredible sensation for the last fifteen days." To be sure, she spells badly for a woman who poses as the friend of litterateurs and savants, and says very little about anything that does not concern her own fame and glory. But she does not cease to remember her friends, whom she "loves, if possible, better than ever." Nor does she forget to send a thousand caresses to her kitten.
A messenger from Warsaw meets her with everything imaginable that can add to the comfort and luxury of her journey, and on reaching there she finds a room fitted up for her like her own boudoir in the Rue St. Honore. She accepts all this consideration with great modesty and admirable good sense. "This tour finished," she writes to d'Alembert, "I feel that I shall have seen enough of men and things to be convinced that they are everywhere about the same. I have my storehouse of reflections and comparisons well furnished for the rest of my life. All that I have seen since leaving my Penates makes me thank God for having been born French and a private person."
The peculiar charm which attracted such rare and marked attentions to a woman not received at her own court, and at a time when social distinctions were very sharply defined, eludes analysis, but it seems to have lain largely in her exquisite sense of fitness, her excellent judgment, her administrative talent, the fine tact and penetration which enabled her to avoid antagonism, an instinctive knowledge of the art of pleasing, and a kind but not too sensitive heart. These qualities are not those which appeal to the imagination or inspire enthusiasm. We find in her no spark of that celestial flame which gives intellectual distinction. In her amiability there seems to be a certain languor of the heart. Her kindness has a trace of calculation, and her friendship of self-consciousness. Of spontaneity she has none. "She loved nothing passionately, not even virtue," says one of her critics. There was a certain method in her simplicity. She carried to perfection the art of savoir vivre, and though she claimed freedom of thought and action, it was always strictly within conventional limits.
She suffered the fate of all celebrities in being occasionally attacked. The role assigned to her in the comedy of "The Philosophers" was not a flattering one, and some criticisms of Montesquieu wounded her so deeply that she succeeded in having them suppressed. She did not escape the shafts of envy, nor the sneers of the grandes dames who did not relish her popularity.
But these were only spots on the surface of a singularly brilliant career. Calm, reposeful, charitable, without affectation or pretension, but not untouched by ennui, the malady of her time, she held her position to the end of a long life which closed in 1777.
"Alas," said d'Alembert, who had been in the habit of spending his mornings with Mlle. de Lespinasse until her death, and his evenings with Mme. Geoffrin, "I have neither evenings nor mornings left."
"She has made for fifty years the charm of her society," said the Abbe Morellet. "She has been constantly, habitually virtuous and benevolent." Her salon brought authors and artists into direct relation with distinguished patrons, especially foreigners, and thus contributed largely to the spread of French art and letters.
It was counted among "the institutions of the eighteenth century."
