hey certainly serve better to
arouse the dormant faculties of woman than embroidery and domestic
drudgery, especially when, as in the high society of France in the
seventeenth century, they are refined by the influence of Spanish
chivalry, and controlled by the spirit of Italian causticity. The dreamy
and fantastic girl was awakened to reality by the experience of wifehood
and maternity, and became capable of loving, not a mere phantom of her
own imagination, but a living man, struggling with the hatreds and
rivalries of the political arena; she espoused his quarrels, she made
herself, her fortune, and her influence, the stepping-stones of his
ambition; and the languid beauty, who had formerly seemed ready to "die
of a rose," was seen to become the heroine of an insurrection. The vivid
interest in affairs which was thus excited in woman must obviously have
tended to quicken her intellect, and give it a practical application; and
the very sorrows--the heart-pangs and regrets which are inseparable from
a life of passion--deepened her nature by the questioning of self and
destiny which they occasioned, and by the energy demanded to surmount
them and live on. No wise person, we imagine, wishes to restore the
social condition of France in the seventeenth century, or considers the
ideal programme of woman's life to be a _marriage de convenance_ at
fifteen, a career of gallantry from twenty to eight-and-thirty, and
penitence and piety for the rest of her days. Nevertheless, that social
condition has its good results, as much as the madly superstitious
Crusades had theirs.

But the most indisputable source of feminine culture and development in
France was the influence of the _salons_, which, as all the world knows,
were _reunions_ of both sexes, where conversation ran along the whole
gamut of subjects, from the frothiest _vers de societe_ to the philosophy
of Descartes. Richelieu had set the fashion of uniting a taste for
letters with the habits of polite society and the pursuits of ambition;
and in the first quarter of the seventeenth century there were already
several hotels in Paris, varying in social position from the closest
proximity of the Court to the debatable ground of the aristocracy and the
bourgeoisie, which served as a rendezvous for different circles of
people, bent on entertaining themselves either by showing talent or
admiring it. The most celebrated of these rendezvous was the Hotel de
Rambouillet, whic