s. But then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of the
first eminence in the eighteenth century. Voltaire chose to be an exile
from the society of Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously as Rousseau
did, and he spoke more bitterly of it in verse than Rousseau ever spoke
bitterly of it in prose.[213] It was, as has been so often said, a
society dominated by women, from the king's mistress who helped to ruin
France, down to the financier's wife who gave suppers to flashy men of
letters. The eighteenth century salon has been described as having three
stages; the salon of 1730, still retaining some of the stately
domesticity, elegance, dignity of the age of Lewis XIV.; that of 1780,
grave, cold, dry, given to dissertation; and between the two, the salon
of 1750, full of intellectual stir, brilliance, frivolous originality,
glittering wastefulness.[214] Though this division of time must not be
pressed too closely, it is certain that the era of Rousseau's advent in
literature with his Discourses fell in with the climax of social
unreality in the surface intercourse of France, and that the same date
marks the highest point of feminine activity and power.

The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with much
light-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely into
manners. We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and defined the
word Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in letters,
conversation, and books, as the sovereign object for our deepest and
warmest adoration. A whole company of transgressors of the marriage law
would melt into floods of tears over a hymn to virtue, which they must
surely have held of too sacred an essence to mix itself with any one
virtue in particular, except that very considerable one of charitably
letting all do as they please. It is much, however, that these tears,
if not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believing
very deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching,
and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man,
and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts,
their lives remain worth having.

It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this time
occasionally sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, "It is your
lover to whom you should never say that you don't believe in God; to
one's husband that does not matter, because in the case of a lover one
must res