there. Chastellux owed his election in a great measure to
Mile, de Lespinasse. In her last hours, already lying on her
deathbed, she secured that of La Harpe. " M. de La Harpe "
says Bachaumont in his Memoirs, "was one of her nurs-
lings ; by her influence she opened the doors of the Academy
to him who is now its secretary. This poet was the last of
those whom she enabled to enter them." All power has its
detractors, all royalty its envious carpers, and these cast
great blame on Mile, de Lespinasse for caballing, so they
said, in the interests of her friends and through the influ-
ence of d'Alembert, to close the doors of the Academy to
those who were not her friends. Dorat, whose style she did
not like (and perhaps not his person), attributed to her the
various checks his academic ambition had met with ; and he
made himself the organ of these accusations in two come-
dies entitled, "Les Proneurs" and "Merlin Bel Esprit."
Society came very near seeing renewed the scandal of the
famous comedy of "Les Philosophes," and Mile, de Les-
pinasse only just escaped being acted on the stage during her
lifetime by Dorat, as Eousseau had been by Palissot. With-
out justifying Dorat, whose comic muse was otherwise very
inoffensive, it cannot be denied that Mile, de Lespinasse
played a very great part in all the Academic struggles, and
that her devotion to the ideas of d'Alembert and the Ency-
clopedists, often carried her too far. Grimm, who men-
tions the reproach, contests its justice without denying its
cause.
"Her enemies," he says," blamed her, very ridiculously, for being concerned in a variety of affairs which were not her business, and for having favoured by her intrigues that philosophic despotism which the cabal of the bigots accused M. d'Alembert of exercising over the Academy, But why should women, who decide everything in France, not decide
