Volume 41, Number 18 · November 3, 1994
All About Eve
By P.N. Furbank
Madame du Deffand and Her World
by Benedetta Craveri, translated by Teresa Waugh
David R. Godine, 481 pp., $35.00
The trouble with many biographies is that their authors have drawn on a stock pattern, the standard sort of thing for the class of subject they have in hand, whether pioneering scientist, maligned statesman, celebrated courtesan, or poet who died young. The result may be not exactly false but, for the particular human case in question, the accents do not fall in the right place, the structure of the narrative is not really meaningful; a story gets told, but it might be that of a dozen other people. It is a pleasure, then, to encounter a biography, like the present one, where the rhythm of a life has been pondered and caught and the shaping of the narrative is really expressive—in a word, where the subject has been allowed to breathe. There is something attractive, moreover, in the tone of this biography, a sort of grave bienséance or propriety. This is not pastiche. Craveri's references to recent scholarship are unimpeachably post-Freudian and even, maybe, post-Foucauldian. Nevertheless she manages to convey a sense that leisurely and judicious 'character-drawing' in the grand siècle manner—as practiced by Mme du Deffand herself, who was mad about it, but here with more human sympathy—is still an intellectually respectable pursuit.
Review, 5370 words
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