of the
farmer-general Bouvet, and asked her: "Have you ever seen anything as
magnificent and in better taste?" She replied: "I would have nothing
to say if Bouvet were the _frotteur_ [floor polisher] of it."

Mme. Geoffrin, more than any other woman of the salons, possessed the
three essential qualifications of a salon leader,--good sense,
tact, and intelligence. She had also _esprit_, perfect simplicity,
precision, and faultless taste; though a sceptic, she was a diplomat
who perfectly understood the art of manoeuvring. In short, Mme.
Geoffrin was an intellectual authority, a sort of minister to society,
and her salon was the great centre and rendezvous, a veritable
institution of the eighteenth century. This seems the more remarkable
when we consider that she belonged to the bourgeoisie, and that
by dint of her exquisite tact, her almost infallible judgment, her
admirable taste in dress, and her keen intelligence, she created for
herself a position which was the envy of all Europe. Such women are
rare. During the last eighteen months of her life, though suffering
from paralysis and rheumatism, which she contracted at a religious
fete at Notre-Dame, she was unremitting in her attention to her
friends and the poor; and up to her death, in 1777, her friends were
faithful to her.

That spirit, or malady, which penetrated and ruled almost every
creature in the eighteenth century found its most notable victim in
Marie de Vichy-Chamrond--Mme. du Deffand. She, so to speak, yawned
out her life in a blase society without faith or ideal. That horrible
affliction, with all its painful symptoms, ennui, whose origin was
seen to lie in an excess and abuse of _esprit_ in a society that
based all its pleasures and happiness upon the mind without any higher
interest than the self, infected a whole century with an "irremediable
disenchantment of others and one's self." This self-cult, or life
in and for the mind, developed sagacity, justness of views, and an
incomparable penetration, but it neglected all the elements necessary
to contentment and those other pleasures, of which the first is love
for one's fellow beings. Mme. du Deffand exemplified this stage
of mental unbalance; and when she wrote of her former friend and
companion: "Mlle. de Lespinasse died to-day at two o'clock; formerly,
that would have been an event for me; to-day, it is nothing at all,"
she gave an idea of the indifference which was characteristic of the
society