Identifier: womenofsalonsoth00hall (find matches)
Title: The women of the salons, and other French portraits
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Hall, Evelyn Beatrice, 1868-1919
Subjects: Women Salons
Publisher: London, New York (etc.) Longmans, Green, and co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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as the mostbrilliant and sympathetic leader of the brilliant societyof France before the Revolution, not as the mistress ofdAlembert, the confidante of Turgot, or the hostess ofthe philosophers, the Encyclopaedists, and the Academi-cians, but as the woman who sounded all the depthsand shoals of emotion and left behind her a cor-respondence which is still warm with life and wet withtears—an immortal picture of passion. Mademoiselles beginning was like her ending—like heryouth and her womanhood—a storm. The mother whobore her in shame and secrecy wept over her and lovedher with that ungoverned affection which can bringnothing but misery. She was baptized in a false name;entered, with an exact duplicity which deceived nobody,in the baptismal register dated Lyons 1732, as thelegitimate daughter of the Sieur Claude Lespinasse,bourgeois, and Julie Navare. Her real mother, theComtesse dAlbon, though she could not own her as herchild, took the little creature not the less to her home in
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//</(//Je//r (/->< MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 23 the old manor-house of Avanches, where she was livingapart from her husband. The little Julie had as com-panion the eight-year-old Cainille, the Comtesses sonand heir. Is it safe to suppose that the children—equally innocent though not equally fortunate—playedtogether happily for a while ? or must one rather thinkthat that passionate and restless nature which was toruin an older Mademoiselle Lespinasse made even herchildhood wayward, fretful, and unsatisfied ? She spoke many years after of her mothers affectionfor her, of the impulsive and sorrowful tenderness whichtried to make up to the child for that fatal stain on herbirth—for the future which such a beginning mustbring. The little girl was surely still very young whenshe found out that there was some difference—a fataldifference, which a child feels all the more because itcannot understand—between her brother and herself.Th

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