DEFFA'ND, MARIE DE VICHY, MARQUISE DU, daughter of Gaspard de Vichy, count of Champ Rend, was born in 1696. She had natural parts, wit, playfulness, and taste, which her education, expressly designed to fit her to shine in the saloons of the capital, tended to stimulate. In 1718 she married the Marquis du Deffand, a colonel, and afterwards general in the French service. Having some time after separated from her husband, she bad her own establish ment, her parties, her admirers, and her petits coopers. She lived like many other ladies of rank and fashion of the times of the Regency and of Louis XV., and her correspondence throws much light on the manners of that age. She numbered among her friends and corres spondents some of the most distinguished men of France, such as President Henault, Montesquieu, /darmontel, D'Alembert, Voltaire, &c. After the death of her husband, in 1750, in order to accommo date herself to her reduced income, she gave up her establishment, and took apartments in the external or extra-claustral part of the Convent of St. Joseph, in the Rue St. Dominique, where she spent the remaining thirty years of her life. She continued however her evening parties, which were in great repute for wit, pleasantry, and bon ton, and to which most foreigners of distinction who resorted to Paris were iutroduced. Being afflicted with blindness, she took as a companion and reader an unprotected young person, Mlle. de l'Espin sale • but she afterwards became jealous of her, and they parted; on occasion Madame du Deffand quarrelled with D'Alembert also.
She continued, though blind, to correspond with her friends, and especially with Voltaire and Horace Walpole, to a very advanced age. She died at St. Joseph, iu September 1780, in her eighty-fourth year. Madame du Deffand possessed some very valuable qualities : she had real wit and taste without affectation, and much tact and sound judg ment whenever caprice or prejudice did not lead her astray. She had a quick perception of merit of every kind, and her house was always open to it : she had a horror of dogmatism, exaggeration, and pedantry : although a free-thinker, she never partook of that absurd fanaticism against religion which characterised some of the philosophic writers of the 18th century. Her judgment was too calm and sober not to perceive the inconsistency of philosophical intolerance; she even gave some good advice to Voltaire on this subject, and was one of the very few who spoke frankly to him. Her Correspondence de Madame du Deffand avec M. Walpole do 1766 h 1780, suivie do sea Lettres h M. de Voltaire de 1759 h 1775,' appeared in 4 vols. 8vo, 1810; and also Correspondence inadite de Madame du Deffand avec D'Alembert, Moutesquieu,le President II6nault, &c., suivie des Lettres do M. de Voltaire b Madame du Deffand,' 2 vole. 8vo, Paris, 1809, with a biographical notice.