splendid
genius of Bossuet first unfolded itself to the world; here Madame de
Sevigne brought her bright, incisive wit, trebly commended by stainless
reputation, unwithering beauty, and charming address, in the woman who
wielded it. The noblest blood of France added the decoration and
inspiration of their presence. It is not easy to overrate the diffusive
beneficent influence that hence went forth to change the fashion of
literature, and to change the fashion of society, for the better. The
Hotel de Rambouillet proper lasted two generations only; but it had a
virtual succession, which, though sometimes interrupted, was scarcely
extinct until the brilliant and beautiful Madame Recamier ceased, about
the middle of the present century, to hold her famous _salons_ in Paris.
The continuous fame and influence of the French Academy, founded by
Richelieu, everybody knows. No other European language has been
elaborately and sedulously formed and cultivated like the French.

But great authors are better improvers of a language than any societies,
however influential. Corneille, Descartes, Pascal, did more for French
style than either the Hotel de Rambouillet or the Academy,--more than
both these two great literary societies together. In verse, Racine,
following Corneille, advanced in some important respects upon the
example and lead of that great original master; but in prose, when
Pascal published his "Provincial Letters," French style reached at once
a point of perfection beyond which it never since has gone. Bossuet,
Bourdaloue, Fenelon, Massillon, Moliere, La Fontaine, Boileau, La
Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere,--what a constellation of names are these, to
glorify the age of Louis XIV.! And Louis XIV. himself, royal embodiment
of a literary good sense carried to the pitch of something very like
real genius in judgment and taste,--what a sun was he (with that talent
of his for kingship, probably never surpassed), to balance and to sway,
from his unshaken station, the august intellectual system of which he
alone constituted the despotic centre to attract and repel! Seventy-two
years long was this sole individual reign. Louis XIV. still sat on the
throne of France when the seventeenth century became the eighteenth.

The eighteenth century was an age of universal reaction in France.
Religion, or rather ecclesiasticism,--for, in the France of those times,
religion was the Church, and the Church was the Roman Catholic
hierarchy,--had