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Evelyn Beatrice Hall. The Friends of Voltaire
The Friends of Voltaire
Table of Contents
PORTRAITS
SOME SOURCES OF INFORMATION
THE FRIENDS OF VOLTAIRE
I. D’ALEMBERT: THE THINKER
II. DIDEROT: THE TALKER
III. GALIANI: THE WIT
IV. VAUVENARGUES: THE APHORIST
V. D’HOLBACH: THE HOST
VI. GRIMM: THE JOURNALIST
VII. HELVÉTIUS: THE CONTRADICTION
VIII. TURGOT: THE STATESMAN
IX. BEAUMARCHAIS: THE PLAYWRIGHT
X. CONDORCET: THE ARISTOCRAT
INDEX
Отрывок из книги
Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Published by Good Press, 2019
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Long before this dramatic dénouement, d’Alembert and Julie de Lespinasse had been something more than friends. But now Mademoiselle saw herself cast adrift on the world. She flung to it her reputation, and yielded, not so much to the entreaties of d’Alembert’s love, as to the more pitiful pleading his solitude and sickness made to the warm maternity in her woman’s heart. She nursed him back to convalescence, and then lived beneath the same roof with him in the Rue Belle Chasse.
Picture the man with his wide, wise intelligence and his diffident and gentle nature, and the woman with her brilliant intuition and her quick, glowing impulse. To his exact logic she could add feeling, passion, sympathy; his frigid and awkward style she could endow with life and fire. Many of his manuscripts are covered with her handwriting. Some, she certainly inspired. She had read widely and felt keenly, and her lover had weighed, pondered, considered. For him, who had for himself no ambition, she could dare and hope all. The perpetual Secretaryship of the Academy shall be turned from a dream to a fact! In that age of women’s influence no woman had in her frail hands more to give and to withhold than this poor companion, whose marvellous power over men and destinies lay not in her head, but in her heart. The true complement of a d’Alembert, daring where he was timid, fervent where he was cold, a woman’s feeling to quicken his man’s reason—here should have been indeed the marriage of true minds.
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