eyes
a few years before her death in 1806.

The existence of those literary assemblies in France during the
eighteenth century, the most important of which were those presided
over by Madame du Deffand, Mdlle. de Lespinasse, and Madame Geoffrin,
were a characteristic feature of the time. It is a notable fact that the
abstention from politics in those assemblies indirectly tended to
increase the power and importance of the women who frequented them.
Alluding to their influence, Montesquieu caustically remarked that a
nation where women give the prevailing tone must necessarily be
talkative. Then, however, it was the men who talked and the women who
listened. The men talked because they could do little else; women gave
the prevailing tone because men of all classes were partly compelled,
and partly willing, to gather around them. The nobles being excluded
from politics--in which none but the Ministers and their creatures could
interfere--exercising no control either as individuals or as a body,
naturally gave themselves up to the pleasures of society. Their
political insignificance thus increased the power and importance of
women.

To a far greater degree was their power and importance increased, on the
contrary, during the first decade of the French Revolution, when, from
the exceptional position they held, the _salons_ of Madame Roland,
Madame Necker, Madame de Suard, and others were essentially
political--that of Madame Roland being almost an echo of the Legislative
Assembly. But women who love freedom abstractedly for its own sake, and
are ready to suffer and die for a political principle, like Madame
Roland, are very rarely met with.

Towards the close of the century the female leaders of the hitherto
literary and social _salons_ were so irresistibly swept into the
whirlpool of public questions and events that they for the most part
involuntarily became mere political partisans. Among others, but with a
considerable modification on the score of the literary element, may be
instanced Madame de Stael, who by descent, education, and natural bias
was inevitably destined to aim at political power. The extent and
prominence of that exercised by her must have been considerable, though
certainly overrated by Napoleon, in whom, however, it excited such
unreasonable apprehension as led him to inflict ten years' banishment
from France upon the talented daughter of Necker.

It must not be inferred that we desire to red