Posted by:
Salons and Board Boredom
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Date: July 23, 2023 07:21PM
We all know Voltaire, but who knows of the Marquise du Defand?We all know Horace Walpole, but who knows she whom he addressed this to:
“What a curious friend you are! You seem quite pleased with my gout, for your first reaction is to derive two letters a week from it. Moreover, you forget the first rule of all, which is that it is the patient who is to be cared for and not the patient who is to care for those who are well, a maxim that has escaped no one since Adam, except you.”
[Walpole committed/requested his end of his correspondence with du Defand to the flames]
It is the French women of the 17th and 18th centuries that we owe much of our European intellectual heritage to. In many important ways this is not an overstatement.
Seeing Henry Bemis make a rare mistake, substituting 16th cent for the sixteen hundreds, brought me to my reading of late. Thinking of the French Salon culture, I shared the following from du Defand in another group that is just as appropriate here, I think:
"I suspect that all the care I take has no other motive than to arm me against boredom; this is a sickness within me that is incurable; everything I do is merely a palliative; do not be angry with me, I am not to blame; your cousin could tell you I am doing my best and that I give every appearance of enjoying myself and of being content.” [trans. Richard Howard]
RfM is like a Salon; also, evidently, palliates a few cases of boredom.
Human
[Thank you to Henry for his legal opinions and more besides. Grateful he still frequents this ‘Salon’.]