Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 49, November, 1861 | Page 2

loyal-hearted, if mistaken. With this confession of sympathy with the woman, we begin the critical consideration of the memoirs of herself she has given to the world.
These memoirs begin at the earliest possible period, including the lives of her parents and grandparents. The latter were illustrious on one side, obscure on the other. She tells us that by her paternal grandmother she was allied to the kings of France, and by her maternal grandfather to the lowest of the people. The grandmother in question was the natural daughter of the famous Mar��chal de Saxe, recognized and educated, but finally left with slender resources, and married to M. Dupin de Francueil, an accomplished person of good family and fortune, greatly her senior. To him she bore one child, a son named Maurice, after the great soldier. As might have been expected, her widowhood was early and long, for her aged partner soon dropped from her side, beloved and regretted. George tells us that her grandmother was wont to insist that an old man can be more agreeable in the marital relation than a young one, and that M. Dupin de Francueil, elegant, accomplished, and devoted to her happiness, had in his life left nothing for her imagination to desire or her heart to regret.
As this lady is one of the heroines of the "Histoire de ma Vie," we cannot do it justice without lingering a little over her portraiture. She is described as tall, fair, and of a Saxon type of beauty. Her manners would seem to have been _de haute ��cole_, and her culture was on a large and noble scale. Austere in her morals, her faith was the deistic philosophy of the ante-revolutionary period; but, like other people of noble mind, instead of making doubt a pretext for license, she brought up virtue to justify the latitude of her creed, that the solid results of conscience should entitle her to the free interpretation of doctrine. She was chaste, benevolent, and sincere. Her mother had been a singer of merit and celebrity, and she, the daughter, had both inherited her musical talent, and had received one of those thorough musical educations which alone make the possession of the art a pleasure and resource. It must often occur to those who hear our young ladies sing and play, that the accomplishment is little valued by them, save as an outward social adornment.
Hence those ambitious and perfectly uninteresting performances with which we are constantly bored in the fashionable musical world. It is self-love which gives us those flat, empty _adagios_, those cold, keen runs and embellishments. Love of the art has more modesty in the undertaking, and more warmth in the execution. George says that she has heard all the greatest singers of modern times, but that her grandmother, in her old age, singing fragments of the operas of her own time in a cracked and trembling voice, and accompanying herself on an old harpsichord with three fingers of a palsied hand, always remained to her a type of art above all others.
The first volume of these memoirs gives interesting notice of the friendships which surrounded Madame Dupin during her married life. These embraced various celebrities, historical and literary. Her husband was the congenial friend of the best minds of the day, and was able, among other things, to procure her the difficult pleasure of an interview with Jean Jacques Rousseau, then living near her in great spleen and retirement. We cannot do better than to give the relation of this in her own words, as preserved by her grand-daughter. It is highly characteristic of the parties and of the times.
"Before I had seen Rousseau, I had read the 'Nouvelle H��lo?se' in one breath, and at the last pages I found myself so overcome that I wept and sobbed. My husband gently rallied me for this; but that day I could only cry from morning till evening. During this, M. de Francueil, with the address and the grace which he knew how to put into everything, ran to find Jean Jacques. I do not know how he managed it, but he carried him off, he brought him, without having communicated to me his intention.
"I, unconscious of all this, was not hastening my toilet. I was with Madame d'Esparb��s de Lussan, my friend, the most amiable woman in the world, and the prettiest, _though she squinted a little, and was slightly deformed._ M. de Francueil had come several times to see if I was ready. I did not observe any marks of haste in my husband, and did not hurry myself, never suspecting that he was there, the sublime Bear, in my parlor. He had entered, looking partly foolish and partly cross, and had seated himself in a corner, showing no other impatience