Note 383 — Chapter XI

She seems to have been, in many ways, far too good for her society, and altogether a lady.—The opinions of the late M. Brunetière and mine on French literature were often very different—though he was good enough not to disapprove of some of my work on it. But with the terms of his expression of mere opinion one had seldom to quarrel. I must, however, take exception to his attribution of grossièreté to La Religieuse. Diderot, as has been fully admitted, was too often grossier: sometimes when it was almost irrelevant to the subject. But here, "scabrous" as the subject might be, the treatment is scrupulously not coarse. Nor do I think, after intimate and long familiarity with the whole of his work, that he was ever a faux bonhomme.