in the facile and
winning manners, the ready tact, the quick intelligence, the rare and
perishable gifts of conversation--in the nameless trifles which are
elusive as shadows and potent as light. It is the way of putting things
that tells, rather than the value of the things themselves. This world
of draperies and amenities, of dinners and conversaziones, of epigrams,
coquetries, and sparkling trivialities in the Frenchwoman's milieu. It
has little in common with the inner world that surges forever behind
and beneath it; little sympathy with inconvenient ideals and exalted
sentiments. The serious and earnest soul to which divine messages have
been whispered in hours of solitude finds its treasures unheeded, its
language unspoken here. The cares, the burdens, the griefs that weigh
so heavily on the great heart of humanity are banished from this social
Eden. The Frenchman has as little love for the somber side of life as
the Athenian, who veiled every expression of suffering. "Joy marks the
force of the intellect," said the pleasure-loving Ninon. It is this
peculiar gift of projecting themselves into a joyous atmosphere, of
treating even serious subjects in a piquant and lively fashion, of
dwelling upon the pleasant surface of things, that has made the French
the artists, above all others, of social life. The Parisienne selects
her company, as a skillful leader forms his orchestra, with a fine
instinct of harmony; no single instrument dominates, but every member is
an artist in his way, adding his touch of melody or color in the fitting
place. She aims, perhaps unconsciously, at a poetic ideal which
shall express the best in life and thought, divested of the rude and
commonplace, untouched by sorrow or passion, and free from personality.

But the representative salons, which have left a permanent mark upon
their time, and a memory that does not seem likely to die, were no
longer simply centers of refined and intellectual amusement. The moral
and literary reaction of the seventeenth century was one of the great
social and political forces of the eighteenth. The salon had become a
vast engine of power, an organ of public opinion, like the modern
press. Clever and ambitious women had found their instrument and
their opportunity. They had long since learned that the homage paid to
weakness is illusory; that the power of beauty is short-lived. With none
of the devotion which had made the convent the time-honored refuge
of ten