Mlle. de Scudery was mistress of the art of conversation, speaking
without affectation and equally well on all affairs, serious, light,
or gallant; she objected, however, to being called a _savante_, and
she was far from resembling the false _precieuses_ to whom she was
likened by her enemies. The occupations of her salon were somewhat
different from those of the salon of Mme. de Rambouillet. M. du Bled
describes them as follows:

"What they did in the salon of Mlle. de Scudery you can guess readily:
they amused themselves as at Mme. de Rambouillet's, they joked quite
cheerfully, smiled and laughed, wrote farces in prose and
poetry. There were readings, _loteries d'esprit_, sonnet-enigmas,
_bouts-rimes_ (rhymes given to be formed into verse), _vers-echos_,
fine literary joustings, discussions between the casuists. This salon
had its talkers and speakers, those who tyrannized over the audience
and those who charmed it, those who shot off fireworks and those who
prepared them, those who had made a symphony of conversation and those
who made of it a monologue and had no flashes of silence. They did not
follow fashion there--they rather made it; in art and literature as
in toilets, smallness follows the fashion, pretension exaggerates it,
taste makes a compact with it."

A specimen of the _enigme-sonnets_ may be of interest, to show in what
intellectual playfulness and trivialities these wits indulged:

"Souvent, quoique leger, je lasse qui me porte.
Un mot de ma facon vaut un ample discours.
J'ai sous Louis le Grand commence d'avoir cours,
Mince, long, plat, etroit, d'une etoffe peu forte.

"Les doigts les moins savants me taillent de la sorte;
Sous mille noms divers je parais tous les jours;
Aux valets etourdis je suis d'un grand secours.
Le Louvre ne voit point ma figure a sa porte.

"Une grossiere main vient la plupart du temps
Me prendre de la main des plus honnetes gens.
Civil, officieux, je suis ne pour la ville.

"Dans le plus rude hiver j'ai le dos toujours nu:
Et, quoique fort commode, a peine m'a-t-on vu,
Qu'ausitot neglige, je deviens inutile."

[Often, although light, I weary the person who carries me. A word in
my manner is worth a whole discourse. I began under Louis the Great to
be in vogue,--slight, long, flat, narrow, of a very slight material.

The most unskilled fingers cut me in their way; under a thousand
different forms I appear every day; I am a great aid to