Julie de Lespinasse
The Double Heart : A Study of Julie de Lespinasse. By Naomi Royde Smith. (Hamish Hamilton. 10s. 6c1.) " FEW women need to be loved " observed Julie de Lespinasse, " most of them only want to be preferred." The sentence throws at least a sidelight upon the fascination of her duplicity.
History does not always repeat itself. Drawing-room life, as it was lived in France in the eighteenth century, can surely never come back. It is this assurance which lends it an undying interest. Regarded superficially it was a despic- able life—yet we cannot forget that the hotbeds of sensibility were the nurseries of heroes. Women trained in an atmos- phere of gallantry, falsity, luxury, convention and vice faced the guillotine with a courage which the single-minded women of to-day, with their extraordinary achievements and out- rageous defiance of precedent, might well fail to do. Obviously the superficial view leaves some factor out of count. Any simple explanation of the enigma is shown to be impossible when we consider that while these influential women covered their coarse minds with a veil of delicate refinement, and professed through all their deceptions the most delicate sense of honour, they were never hypocrites. They were playing a game with secret rules.
Meanwhile, for a generation like the present, it is a deeply interesting game to watch ; graceful, charming, intriguing, reprehensible.
How Mademoiselle de Lespinasse played her lovers oft against one another, deceived everyone, and finally died of drugs and heartbreak will interest all the novelises readers— however well they knew the story before. In her hands is not a twice-told tale, but a set of human documents re examined under an intense, if artificial, light.
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