Sophie de la Briche, afterwards Madame d'Houdetot, was the daughter of a rich _fermier general_; and destined, of course, to a marriage de convenance, she was united very young to the Comte d'Houdetot, an officer of rank in the army; a man who was allowed by his friends to be _tres peu amiable_, and whom Madame d'Epinay, who hated him, called _vilain_, and _insupportable_. He was too good-natured to make his wife absolutely miserable, but _un bonheur a faire mourir d'ennui_, was not exactly adapted to the disposition of Sophie; and there was no principle within, no restraint without, no support, no counsel, no example, to guide her conduct or guard her against temptation. The power by which Madame d'Houdetot captivated the gay, handsome, dissipated Saint-Lambert, and kindled into a blaze the passions or the imagination of Rousseau, was not that of beauty. Her face was plain and slightly marked with the small-pox; her eyes were not good; she was extremely short-sighted, which gave to her countenance and address an appearance of uncertainty and timidity; her figure was _mignonne_, and in all her movements there was an indescribable mixture of grace and awkwardness. The charm by which this woman seized and kept the hearts, not of lovers only, but of friends, was a character the very reverse of that of Madame du Chatelet, who would have deemed it an insult to be compared to her either in mind or beauty:--the absence of all _pretension_, all coquetry; the total surrender of her own feelings, thoughts, interests, where another was concerned; the frankness which verged on giddiness and imprudence; the temper which nothing could ruffle; the warm kindness which nothing could chill; the bounding spirit of gaiety, which nothing could subdue,--these qualities rendered Madame d'Houdetot an attaching and interesting creature, to the latest moment of her long life. "Mon Dieu! que j'ai d'impatience de voir dix ans de plus sur la tete de cette femme!" exclaimed her sister-in-law, Madame d'Epinay, when she saw her at the age of twenty. But at the age of eighty, Madame d'Houdetot was just as much a child as ever,--"aussi vive, aussi enfant, aussi gaie, aussi distraite, aussi bonne et tres bonne;"[148] in spite of wrinkles, sorrows, and frailties, she retained, in extreme old age, the gaiety, the tenderness, the confiding simplicity, though not the innocence of early youth.