LE MARQUISE DE CREQUY. 7^ 



SECOND EXTRACT, 1778. 



" Although I had never any kind of familiar intercourse with the Palais 

 Royale, nor with the coterie of the Encyclopedistes, the latter imagined to 

 make use of me to acquire the protection of the Due d'Orleans. I knew 

 that D'Alembert had gone to the Marchioness de Sillery to engage her to soli- 

 cit the Duchess de Chartres to interpose her good offices between her father, 

 the Duke de Penthievre, and Condorcet. He even threw out some hints to 

 Madame de Sillery upon the propriety and utility of a treaty of alliance, 

 offensive and defensive, on condition that she would not cabal with the 

 Saints, and more especially of her never attacking the writers of the Encyclope- 

 dia. M. de Schomberghad given Diderot to understand that Madame de Sillery 

 was preparing to write against them, which greatly alarmed them from the 

 opinion of the fashionable world, and the coterie of the Palais Royale, of 

 which Madame de Sillery had become the oracle, and especially on account 

 of the Bishops and the Parliamentarians, who were only watching their op- 

 portunity to roughly handle the Encyclopedistes. Besides, they wished through 

 her to gain the niece of Madame de Montesson, who had married the Duke 

 of Orleans, secretly it is true, but with as little secresy as she was able. 



D'Alembert went so far as to propose to Madame de Sillery to get her 

 received as a member of the French Academy, with Madame de' Montesson, 

 Madame d'Angevilliers, Madame Necker, and me into the bargain. We should 

 have served him as satelites, or rather as an ' Encadrement.' Do you not 

 think you see me upon the same line with Madame de Montesson, 

 who was the most ridiculous person in the world, and a daughter of 

 the Captain of a Slave-ship ? As Madame d'Angevilliers, the widow of the 

 king's valet de chambre ? as Madame Neckar nee Churchod as she always 

 wrote upon her cards ? and finally as Madame le Marquise de Sillery, against 

 whom, at this time, nothing wrong could be alleged, but whom I had always 

 made sit upon a folding-chair in my drawing-room, to the period of her 

 marriage with that fool Sillery ? When the Commander de Villaneuve came 

 to acquaint me with this fine project, I so turned it into ridicule that my 

 name was immediately erased from the list of candidates for the French Aca- 

 demy. Mesdames Montesson and d'Angevilliers were not deficient either in 

 tact or pretensions ; Madame Neckar was sufficiently vain, God knows, and 

 unfortunately so too for France. She then possessed sufficient credit to bring 

 about innovations that might turn to her own advantage and personal plea- 

 sure. In short, the Encyclopedistes had reckoned upon the support of the , 

 old Duke of Orleans, to whom the academic honours conferred upon Madame 

 de Montesson, who had bewitched him, would have appeared the most deli- 

 cious thing in the world, and if the project they had formed appears at first 

 whimsical, it must be confessed that it was not unexcusable. I heard after- 

 wards, from Madame de Genlis, that after an hour and a half of philosophi- 

 cal argument on one side, and of religious insinuation on the other, D'Alem- 

 bert concluded by saying to Madame de Genlis, ' You will always have 

 grace on your side, Madame, but will not have force.' ' Sir/ she replied, with 

 the greatest good humour, ' our sex have never need of it.' D'Alembert 

 composed, some months afterwards, under the name of the Abbe Remy, the 

 first pamphlet that was ever published against Madame de Genlis and her 

 works. 



A-propos of the Montessons, I must tell you that they assumed the airs of 

 an hereditary rancour against our house, sa'ying always that the Montessons 

 and the Crequys were mortal foes. ' Truly,' said the old Countess du Gues- 

 clin, who was a Crequy, one day to us, ' I well recollect their affairs with us, 

 and you shall see that they are wrong to remember it.' She then told us that 

 at the period when the noblesse of the second and third orders were 

 pillaging titles right and left, the eldest of the Montesons modestly seized the 



